When about seems rare (with the "approximately when" meaning). I did find one example in the British National Corpus from an oral history interview (formatting and punctuation added):
And er, so what, er, what, er, sort of era was, when about was this? still right at the beginning of the war when you were doing this, or ...?
That would have been, I would say, maybe August nineteen thirty eight.
I don't recall hearing when about often (eastern USA) but I am certain I've heard when abouts. I can't find evidence of this in any corpus I searched, but keep in mind that most of the spoken language samples available, for example, in COCA, are from news broadcasts. If your intent is to accurately represent colloquial speech, when abouts or whenabouts may be appropriate. It seems to be common enough in various dialects that people have questions about it, and there are plenty of search results (it seems common in forums). When abouts is also used by people on Twitter, usually in questions:
when abouts do you think you will be back?
When abouts would not be common where formal register is required. I probably wouldn't even use it in an email; I'd replace it with one of the more commonly written expressions pointed out by @Rachel or @drɱ65 δ. However, I wouldn't be surprised if, walking down the hall, my boss were to ask me, When abouts do you think you could do that?
As Bill Franke has said, inheriting applies to the acquisition of traits. However, I think the idiom that best fits your translation of 'he has gone on his father' would actually be:
He takes after his father.
Or in the case of a nose or other distinguishing feature:
He has his father's nose.
Best Answer
Let's put it this way: It's "dodgy" if you are doing a scientific paper and should be using more precise quantitative terminology. @kiamlaluno's suggestion of replacing it with "many" doesn't really improve precision in those cases, though.
I have seen "a lot of" used appropriately a lot of times in scholarly works, though, especially those dealing with the humanities rather than the sciences, and especially lately. Language changes, as we all know, and what were strict and uncompromising requirements 100 years ago are often relaxed today.
In fact, although I don't see why one couldn't use the expression as an aside or commentary on a piece of data, it does give a much less formal feel to a piece of writing, and may induce the reader not to take the statement seriously. Consider the second sentences in the following comparison:
The tone of the second example is simply more in keeping with the dispassionate delivery of data, and is likely to be much better received by the academic community. So even if you are not stylistically prohibited from using "a lot of" it may make sense to avoid it in an academic context. And if you are going to school in Holland, and that is the prevailing sentiment you encounter, taking a rebellious stance on this issue may affect your progress negatively.