How to use this list
The list above gives you a ranking of the difficulty of German texts in terms of their grammar and vocabulary. Moreover, you also have an ability to find out much more information about the scores of each work (see the links on the right side of the table), or even to read the work online. The criteria in the table are as follows:
- title, author, length should be pretty clear (but note that, if you click on the title, you can open a more detailed analysis);
- grammar score is a grammatical score arising out of an analysis of the text with the help of various grammatical complexity indexes (like the Automated Readability, Coleman-Liau ones and many others - you can find out more about them by clicking through to the more detailed analysis link on any of the short texts);
- vocabulary score is a score based on word frequency: we have calculated what part of the most frequently used German vocabulary appears in the text (you can find out a lot more if you click on any short text's individual analysis page);
- overall score consists of the grammar and vocabulary scores averaged out, but sometimes this scores is weighed and adjusted for specific kinds of literature (most prominently - for poetry);
- detailed analysis, reading options provide you with an opportunity to either find out much more about the complexity of each individual text, or even to read it on our site for free;
- the 'Interlinear' link is a link to an Interlinear (or 'subtitled') version of this text when the original text has a translation below each word or expression (such a link exists only if an Interlinear text is available, of course).
As a final matter, please note that these lists are language-specific, and still experimental - thus results might not translate very well across languages. Moreover, we will probably come up with more accurate lists in the future as we refine our methods - but hopefully these ones still give you an indication.
Other resources and languages
First of all, you could have a look at out our other page with German books instead of short stories.
Moreover, you can check out our literature discovery tool in languages other than German. You can do so here:
French Lithuanian Portuguese Russian Spanish Swedish
Lastly, if you are interested in languages and literature - visit our project Interlinear Books. We seek to bring literature to language learning, and we have been using Interlinear translations to do that: bilingual books where the original is followed by a translation beneath each word or phrase. You can find short free Interlinear texts and longer books on our site too. We even have a German Interlinear book available for purchase.