Although I find "Thing Explainer" funny, the idea that the problem with English is just that it has a lot of words is misguided. In the 1930s when artificial la

Although I find "Thing Explainer" funny, the idea that the problem with English is just that it has a lot of words is misguided. In the 1930s when artificial languages were big there was one called "Basic English" that was based on the top 800 English words. The problem is that even with a small vocabulary you can get very complicated sentences and idioms, and those are more confusing to language learners than just words (which after all, can be looked up or figured out from context).