Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

In the magic, when a Chinese speaker asks his Chinese mate in front of you, ‘What is this?' as he picks up a playing card. In this case, you thought that one ask another what the card is. But in fact the speaker telling his colleague what is the card already. For a Chinese can use four different tones to pronounce each syllables, he used ‘What1' telling his friend ‘this is spade', ‘What2' as ‘this is heart' and so on. Now let us check the second syllable in the sentence of ‘What is this' It is ‘is'. It could also be pronounced in four different ways. We regard them as 1,2,3,4. Finally, the syllable ‘this' can be pronounced in four ways too. Then put ‘is' and ‘this' together it should be 1,1=1, 1,2=2, 1,3=3, 1,4=4, 2,1=5, 2,2=6, 2,3=7 and so on. By this way, the speaker tells his friend the card is spade 9 or club 12 while an English speaker thought the first Chinese ask question to his friend.
From that example you may understand, in everyday speech, an English speaker at least wasted ¾ information signals. If we can save this time, then every English speaker can master millions words during short time while currently a English speaker can only master around 30,000 words during lifetime.