I am honoured to announce that one of my Unterstufe students, passed the First Certificate English test.  With an overall score of 176 points, she passed her test at Grade B on the Cambridge English Scale which is the equivalent of  Level B2 in the Council of  Europe's Common European Framework of Reference. For those who are not familiar with the grading system, B2 is the "matura" level.

The test was organized by Cambridge Assessment Center in Vienna.

Being an English teacher I work with words every day. According to English Oxford Living Dictionaries there are about a quarter of a million English words and a new word is added almost every day.

But don't worry. You don't need so many words to be able to speak English fluently. While most adult native speakers use 20000 to 35000 words, you need about 10000 words to reach a near-native level of vocabulary.  This is the number of words an average 8-year-old native-speaker of English knows.

Writers are especially gifted with words but have you ever thought what words and with what frequency J.K.Rowling uses in her book, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." (The word analysis has been done in Microsoft Power BI by Excellab.at)