Spanish books difficulty ranking for learners

Below you can see our list of Spanish books evaluated for difficulty. The scores range from 1 - 100, and the higher the score the higher the difficulty. Click on any column to sort, or click on the title of any text to open a more detailed analysis. You can also use the menu on the top to navigate to our other rankings. If you want to know more about what these criteria mean, scroll down. There is also a short Spanish texts difficulty index available.

No. Title Author Length (words) Grammar score Vocabulary score Overall score Detailed analysis Read online Interlinear
1 Edad de Oro Jose Marti 67,747 33 44 3939% Open
2 Cuatro Jinetes del Apocalipsis Vicente Blasco Ibáñez 133,325 45 46 4646% Open
3 Isla del Tesoro Robert Louis Stevenson 89,908 43 48 4646% Open
4 Angelina Rafael Delgado 92,464 41 52 4747% Open
5 Condenada y Otros Cuentos Vicente Blasco Ibáñez 35,509 44 54 4949% Open
6 Platero y Yo Juan Ramón Jiménez 11,979 39 58 4949% Open
7 Trafalgar Benito Pérez Galdós 51,943 45 53 4949% Open
8 Cuentos Clásicos del Norte, Primera Serie Edgar Allan Poe 57,403 46 54 5050% Open
9 Nariz de un notario Edmond About 26,479 44 56 5050% Open
10 Navidad en las Montañas Ignacio Manuel Altamirano 18,259 44 56 5050% Open
11 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 382,235 43 58 5151% Open
12 Historia de la célebre Reina de España Doña Juana, llamada vulgarmente La Loca Anonymous 9,015 41 63 5252% Open
13 Cuentos de Amor de Locura y de Muerte Horacio Quiroga 49,905 43 63 5353% Open
14 Morriña Emilia Pardo Bazán 70,411 43 62 5353% Open
15 Fábulas literarias Tomás de Iriarte 14,873 42 66 5454% Open
16 pazos de Ulloa Emilia Pardo Bazán 84,834 43 66 5555% Open
17 Viaje de Novios Emilia Pardo Bazán 69,776 44 65 5555% Open

How to use this ranking

The ranking above provides you with a rough analysis of the grammatical, vocabulary and overall difficulty of the works, and it also includes the links to find out more, or even to read the work. It works as follows:

  • title is not only the official name of the work, but also, by clicking on it, you can open a more detailed analysis;
  • author, length are also pretty self-explanatory;
  • grammar score is a score computed by calculating and combining various indexes (ARI, CLI, MTLD, HDD, Yule's I - you can find out more about them by clicking through to the more detailed analysis part on any of the titles);
  • vocabulary score is a score based on the frequency of use of words in the text (much more analysis on it is also provided if you click through to the more-detailed analysis);
  • overall score is just a grammar and vocabulary score averaged out, although sometimes these scores are also weighed and adjusted for specific kinds of literature (most prominently - for poetry);
  • detailed analysis is a link to a special page with a much more detailed analysis, which we have compiled for each work;
  • the 'read' link is a link to read the work in its entirety on the website (we provide such links when that is legally and technically possible);
  • the 'Interlinear' link is a link to an Interlinear (or 'subtitled') version of this work when the original text has a translation below each word or expression (such a link exists only if an Interlinear text is available).

Please also have in mind that the list provided on this page is language-specific, and still experimental - thus its results might not be comparable with any results in any other of our languages (and perhaps not even with the short texts list. We might quite likely come up with more precise lists in the future as we improve our methods - but hopefully this one still give you an indication about what literature to choose.

Other resources and languages

First, you should have a look at out our other page with Spanish short stories or poetry instead of books.

Then we suggest you also check out our literature discovery tool in languages other than Spanish. You can do so here:

French German Lithuanian Portuguese Russian Swedish

And finally, if you are interested in languages and literature - please take a look at our project Interlinear Books. We have a mission to bring literature to language learning, and we have been largely using Interlinear translations to do that - you can find books to purchase and short free Interlinear texts on our site. You can even find a Spanish Interlinear book up for sale on our site.