Learning a new language?

When Marash Girl taught English to speakers of other languages, she noticed that the Russians remembered with ease all the long words and the Chinese remembered all the short words . . . never in the reverse!  Now if the Russian students had grown up bilingual (speaking Chinese as well) and the Chinese students had grown up bilingual (speaking Russian as well), there'd be no problem for either of them.  But then, of course, they could have grown up trilingual, including English in the mix, and they wouldn't have had to be in her class!