Why are there so many words in English?

One of the challenges for people learning English is that there are so many different ways to say the same thing, but this can also be an advantage because if you can’t remember one word you can use another one. This is because Great Britain was governed by various different ethnic groups in its history, and English is a kind of melting pot of their different languages. Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans succeeded each other for control of the country up to the Middle Ages, when the first books were written in English - including Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous Canterbury Tales which many Italians have to study at school. So for example don’t worry if you can’t remember an Anglo-Saxon word like “cheap” because you can use the Latin-based “economical” which means the same thing.