How many is most

Linguists Paul Nation and John Read who doesn't love a bit of nominative determinism? Their theory is that if you count up how many of the 50 words you understand and multiply the total by you are able to estimate your total English vocabulary.

Words start off simply enough; dog, editor, immense but they quickly become more obscure, for example would you know how to use "oleaginous" or "cowsucker" in a sentence? Hint: the latter doesn't have anything to do with cows And now Paul's free English vocabulary size test, using words, is available online.

Stuart Webb, professor of applied linguistics at the University of Western Ontario, has studied the process of learning vocabulary or - to give it its sexier name - language acquisition.

He discovered that it is incredibly difficult for a language learner to ever know as many words as a native speaker.

Typically native speakers know 15, to 20, word families - or lemmas - in their first language. So does someone who can hold a decent conversation in a second language know 15, to 20, words? Is this a realistic goal for our listener to aim for? Prof Webb found that people who have been studying languages in a traditional setting - say French in Britain or English in Japan - often struggle to learn more than 2, to 3, words, even after years of study.

In fact, a study in Taiwan showed that after nine years of learning a foreign language half of the students failed to learn the most frequently-used 1, words. And that is the key, the frequency with which the words you learn appear in day-to-day use in the language you're learning. You don't need to know all of the words in a language: for example it seems unlikely that anyone reading this has suffered from not knowing that "Zyzzyva" is a kind of tropical weevil and not a Spice Girls lyric.

Connecting billions of people worldwide, the internet is a core pillar of the modern information society. The global internet penetration rate is At the opposite end of the spectrum is North Korea with virtually no online usage penetration among the general population , ranking last worldwide. As of , Asia was the region with the largest number of online users — over 2.

Europe was ranked second with almost million internet users. Which country has the highest number of internet users? China, India and the United States rank ahead all other countries in terms of internet users. China has more than million internet users, and India has approximately million online users.

Both countries still have large parts of the population that are offline. Loading statistic Show source. Download for free You need to log in to download this statistic Register for free Already a member? Log in. Show detailed source information? Register for free Already a member? More information. Supplementary notes. Other statistics on the topic. Joseph Johnson. Research expert covering internet use, cybercrime, digital privacy, and online search.

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