Building vocabulary
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How many words?
How many words does the average non-native university student know?5,000 - 15,000 (?)
Well, the question is almost impossible to answer. To begin with, it depends on what you mean by a "word". Are stone, stoned, stony, stonewall, stone-wall different words? Lexicographers (experts on words) like to talk about word families with a head word and "relatives".
Swedish first-year university students on an average score 62/120 on the ForumEducation level 2 vocabulary test, indicating a basic vocabulary of around 5,500 words. The test uses the most common 30,000 English words. Graduate Chinese students average around 4,000 on the same test.
