How do I calculate the number of times a word occurs in a sentence?

Question

So I've been learning Python for some months now and was wondering how I would go about writing a function that will count the number of times a word occurs in a sentence. I would appreciate if someone could please give me a step-by-step method for doing this.

Answer 1

text=input("Enter your sentence:")
print("'the' appears", text.count("the"),"times")

simplest way to do it

Answer 2

Simplest way:

def count_occurrences(word, sentence):
    return sentence.count(word)