Wide context

Complete PICLE corpus of essays by Polish advanced EFL students (330,000)

Supposedly, a mediocre but conscientious person whose attitude towards English is fairly favourable intents to learn that language. What facts will he have to face? English may seem difficult to grasp due to its, as it may appear, boundless vocabulary of 500.000 words and 300.000 technical terms. However, a student of FC level needs 5.000 words to be communicatively efficient. The pronunciation might be one of the problems our tongue will have to wrestle with. English [(] and [(] do not have their counterparts in Polish, so only more gifted learners would be able to utter those sounds in the way that will neither resemble [d] or [ t] in the case of the latter and [f] corresponding to the former. There are 26 letters in the English alphabet and 45 sounds. That fact discourages Polish native speakers who use 32 letters and produce 37 sounds. That disproportion of sounds and letters in both languages at least partly explains the apparent discrepancy between the English spelling and pronunciation.