01 / 10

Instagram confirms nothing

We requested a handle nobody could have registered. Instagram returned HTTP 200, the same as a real account.

A status code is not proof. Any list that checked that way checked nothing.

02 / 10

So we asked the owners

Each handle was read off the website of the organisation that owns it. A handle printed on cervantes.es is the Instituto Cervantes saying it is theirs.

It caught three handles we had guessed wrong on the first pass.

03 / 10

97

Word forms that cover half of every page, across 1,284,927 words of real Spanish books.

Not a thousand. Fewer than a hundred.

04 / 10

9,267

Word forms needed to cover nine words in ten. A separate corpus of modern subtitles gives almost the same figure.

Two corpora, no shared text, no shared century. Same shape.

05 / 10

25.4 years

How long one new word a day takes to reach nine words in ten.

Four words in five takes 7.2 years. Nineteen in twenty takes 55.6.

06 / 10

8 of 10

Words that one major word-of-the-day feed served on the day we checked, sitting outside the commonest 5,000 words of modern Spanish.

Useful words. Rare ones.

07 / 10

camaron

Shrimp. It appeared zero times across 1,284,927 words of Spanish books.

The median word of the day appeared 5 times in the same corpus.

08 / 10

The core, not the tail

You are not short of rare words. You are short of repetitions of common ones.

A page shows you que forty times in forty jobs. A feed shows you one word once.

09 / 10

The ten

@fundeurae, @institutocervantes, @spanishdict, @espanolconjuan, @spanishlandschool

@whynotspanish, @hola.spanish, @lingq_central, @rtve, @italki

10 / 10

Follow them anyway

The daily post is a good reminder and a poor engine. Put the reading in first, then let the feed decorate it.

Full method, all the numbers and every source in the guide.

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