You may think your toddler is just playing in the sand box, but she may really be conducting a sophisticated scientific experiment and making inferences every time she pours out another scoop of sand.
Kim Chae-young crams five evenings a week, toiling deep into the night. But unlike most young South Koreans who spend hours at special schools to polish their English and math, she studies slide steps and bubbly lyrics.
Although you may have learned English very thoroughly, it is possible that the regional accents you discover when you arrive in the UK make the language harder to understand than you thought.
CJ had learned to read late, had an average IQ, and had always been a mediocre student. However, on the Modern Language Aptitude Test, he scored extremely high.
Others say that exceptional brains play a more significant role. In the 1980s, neurolinguist Loraine Obler of the City University of New York found a talented language learner she called 'CJ', who could speak five languages.
According to Krashen, Lomb was an ordinary person with no special qualities, apart from a desire to learn languages and an effective way of achieving this aim.
Stephen Krashen, from the University of California, maintains that exceptional language learners simply work harder, and have a better understanding of how they learn.
Asked if there was any reason someone couldn't learn dozens of languages, Pinker replied: "No theoretical reason I can think of, except, eventually, interference; Similar kinds of knowledge can interfere with one another."
Herinda argues that maintaining this ability would take resources from other activities. But others see no reason why people should not be able to learn a huge number of languages.
Assuming that each language has 20,000 words and that Mezzofanti could remember a word after encountering it once, he would have to learn one word a minute, twelve hours a day for five and a half years!
In the discussion that followed Hudson's publication of N's claims, a reader disputed the Mezzofanti story, saying he found it absolutely preposterous, and pointing out how long it would take to learn 72 languages.
The writer, 'N', described how his grandfather, who was Sicilian and had never gone to school, could learn languages with such remarkable ease that by the end of his life he could speak 70, and read and write 56.
Throughout the 19th century, commoners in England were becoming educated through normal schools, church schools, and mutual instruction classes, and by the 1830s, approximately 75% of the working class had learned to read.
Scientists are now satisfied they know about the universe's birth, and about its childhood. But they still need to learn about its early infancy thirteen billion years ago.