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Britain was originally inhabited by indigenous peoples, but following its conflicts with Rome, it came under Roman rule for about 400 years. Later, events like the Norman Conquest and the long reign of the Plantagenet dynasty left deep traces that we can still see in the English language today. Today, a colleague asked me, "Since you’ve mastered English, wouldn’t it be easier for you to learn German or Italian?" I replied, "Well, English and Italian do share a lot of common word roots." Based on my own observation, the vocabulary breakdown feels roughly like 40% Greek, 30% Latin, just under 10% Norman and French combined, and a little over 20% native English. While Britain had no direct contact with ancient Greece, this distribution shows just how much Rome itself had absorbed from Greek culture. English is said to have around 730,000 words, giving it the largest vocabulary of any widely spoken modern language. Interestingly, Nordic languages generally have vast vocabularies that even surpass English. In contrast, French has about 130,000 words, Spanish has 93,000, and Cebuano—spoken in the Philippines, a country I am very fond of—has around 14,000. For comparison, about 70% of the Japanese vocabulary was adopted from ancient China, while native Japanese makes up just under 20%. Similarly, English contains a little over 10% of these borrowed Sinitic terms through modern cultural exchange. It is absolutely true that mastering English gives you a solid foundational understanding of Latin and Greek roots. My colleague then asked how many English words I actually know. "Around 40,000," I answered. To test this, my colleague pulled out a difficult-looking book and asked me the meanings of words they didn't understand. They asked about three words, and I answered all of them instantly. Two of them were "concoction" and "harpoon"—I forgot the third one, but no matter. Looking at the cover, the book was Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. When I was young, I spent about three months reading that very book, meticulously looking up every single word I didn't know.