Literature analysis for language learners: Avgrundens folk (Norden) by Jack London

Avgrundens folk (Norden) by Jack London : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Avgrundens folk (Norden) for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 58,974, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Avgrundens folk (Norden) to have a difficulty score of 52. Here're its scores:

Measure Score
easy difficult (1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty 52% 52
Vocabulary Difficulty 57% 57
Grammatical Difficulty 47% 47

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

57%

Vocabulary difficulty: 57%

This score has been calculated based on frequency vocabulary (the top most frequently used words in Swedish). It combines various measures of Avgrundens folk (Norden)'s text analyzed in terms of frequency vocabulary: a plain vocabulary score, frequency-weighted vocabulary score, banded frequency vocabulary scores based on vocabulary of the text falling in the top 1,000 or 2,000 most frequent words, etc. Here's a further breakdown of how often the top most frequently used words in Swedish appear in the full text of Avgrundens folk (Norden):

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for Avgrundens folk (Norden): a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Avgrundens folk (Norden):

Measure Score
Measure Score
Number of words 58,974
Number of unique words 10,188
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities 1,447
Number of very rare non-entity words 1,492
Number of sentences 8,822
Average number of words/sentence 7

There is some research suggesting that that you need to know about 98% of a text's vocabulary in order to be able to infer the meaning of unknown words when reading. If true, this means that you would need to know around 9,984 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Avgrundens folk (Norden) without a dictionary and fully understand it.

Grammatical Difficulty: Breakdown

47%

Grammatical difficulty: 47%

Here is the further grammatical comparison on this text. You can find an explanation of all these scores below.

Measure Score
Measure Score
Automated Readability Index 4
Coleman-Liau Index 7
Type/Token Ratio (TTR) 0.172754
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR) 0.00000292933
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR) 0.00000146466
MTLD Index 55
HDD Index 63
Yule's I Index 66
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I) 61

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Avgrundens folk (Norden) is 0.172754. The TTR is the most basic measure of lexical diversity. To calculate it, we divide the number of unique words by the number of words in the text. For example, for this text, the number of unique words is 10,188, while the number of words is 58,974, so the TTR is 10,188 / 58,974 = 0.172754. However, the TTR is a very crude measure, as it is extremely dependent on text length. The longer the text, the lower the TTR is usually going to be, since common words tend to often repeat. Especially since the number of words in this text is more than 1,000, the TTR is not likely to give an accurate measure.

The root type-token ratio (RTTR) and corrected type-token ratio (CTTR) are measures which were suggested by researchers to partially address the problem of TTR's variance on text length. In the RTTR, the number of unique words is divided by a square of the number of words (therefore, 10,188 / (58,974 * 58,974) = 0.00000292933), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 10,188 / 2 * (58,974 * 58,974) = 0.00000146466). However, these measures are not as easily readable, and also there is a growing body of research asserting that CTTR and RTTR do not effectively address the problems of text length. Therefore, while we do provide the full text's TTR, RTTR and CTTR on this page, these fiqures do not form part of our final calculations.

The Automated Readability Index (ARI) is one readability measure that has been developed by researchers over the years. The formula for calculating the ARI is as follows:
Formula for calculating the Automated Readability Index

The ARI should compute a reading level approximately corresponding to the reader's grade level (assuming the reader undertakes formal education). Thus, for example, a value of 1 is kindergarten level, while a value of 12 or 13 is the last year of school, and 14 is a sophomore at college. The current ARI of this text is 4, making it understandable for 4-grade students at their expected level of education.

The Coleman Liau Index (CLI) is a similar index designed by Meri Coleman and T. L. Liau, and it is supposed to compute the grade level of the reader (thus, for example, sophomore level material would be around grade 14, or year 14 of formal education, while kindergarten / primary school level material would be close to grade 1 in the CLI). The CLI is usually slightly higher than the ARI. The CLI is computed with this formula:
Formula for calculating the Coleman-Liau Readability Index

It is notable that other indexes exist, such as the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease, Gunning-Fog Score, and others, but we have chosen not to include them, since, contrary to the ARI and CLI, such other indexes are based on a syllable count and therefore arguably only work for English and not Swedish.

We compute a further compound lexical diversity index, which should range from 1 to a 100 (with the standard deviation being around 10, and its average value being around 50) - it is 61 in the present case. The compound lexical diversity index consists of the following indexes, averaged out (and also provided in the table above):

  • the Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity (MTLD) index - a measure which is based on computing the TTR for increasingly larger parts of the text until the TTR drops below a certain threshold point (around 0.7 in our case) - in which case, the TTR is reset, and the overall counter is increased; the counter is at the end divided by the number of words in text; as a result, the MTLD does not significantly vary by text length;
  • the Yule's I index (based on Yule's K characteristic inverted) - an index based on the work of the statistician G.U. Yule, who published his index of Frequency Vocabulary in his paper "The statistical study of literary vocabulary"; Yule's I takes into account the number of words in the text, and a compound summed measure of word frequency;
  • the Hypergeometric Distribution D (HD-D) index (based on vocd) - an index which assesses the contribution of each word to the diversity of the text; to calculate such contributions, a hypergeometric distribution is used to compute probabilities of each word appearing in word samples extracted from the text; then such distributions are divided by sample sizes and added up;

Our overall measure of grammatical diversity is based on a combination of the compound lexical diversity index (which includes the MTLD, Yule's I and HD-D indexes), the ARI and CLI, all normalized and given certain weight. The score should normally range from 1 to 100. In this case, the score is 47.

Other Information about Avgrundens folk (Norden) by Jack London

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Avgrundens folk (Norden) is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

Jag försökte göra på samma sätt, men brödet tycktes fastna i munnen på mig och jag erinrade mig snickarens ord: — Ni behöver minst ett helt mått vatten för att kunna få ned brödet. Jag gick bort till en mörk krok, dit jag sett de andra gå, och där fann jag vatten. Så återvände jag till min skilly. Den var tjock, okryddad, klimpig och besk. Särskilt den beska smaken, som jag länge hade kvar i munnen, kvalmade mig. Jag försökte bekämpa kvalmet, men sex munnar skilly och bröd var allt jag förmådde få ned. Min sidokamrat åt sin egen portion och min också, skrapade skålarna och såg sig om efter mera. — Jag mötte en herre, som gav mig något gott att ...

Top most frequently used words in Avgrundens folk (Norden) by Jack London*

Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
1 och 2,403 4.07%
2 att 1,480 2.51%
3 en 1,120 1.9%
4 som 1,019 1.73%
5 på 991 1.68%
6 de 841 1.43%
7 det 834 1.41%
8 jag 762 1.29%
9 av 728 1.23%
10 för 680 1.15%
11 till 582 0.99%
12 inte 538 0.91%
13 är 494 0.84%
14 var 489 0.83%
15 han 488 0.83%
16 den 485 0.82%
17 ett 480 0.81%
18 med 466 0.79%
19 sig 391 0.66%
20 hade 354 0.6%
21 man 352 0.6%
22 mig 333 0.56%
23 om 329 0.56%
24 så 311 0.53%
25 då 235 0.4%
26 har 232 0.39%
27 skulle 210 0.36%
28 kan 210 0.36%
29 dem 209 0.35%
30 hon 203 0.34%
31 från 194 0.33%
32 få 192 0.33%
33 ha 189 0.32%
34 kunde 160 0.27%
35 vi 160 0.27%
36 över 160 0.27%
37 eller 158 0.27%
38 måste 155 0.26%
39 honom 155 0.26%
40 än 154 0.26%
41 där 150 0.25%
42 sin 149 0.25%
43 men 147 0.25%
44 ut 145 0.25%
45 under 131 0.22%
46 blott 128 0.22%
47 sade 127 0.22%
48 arbete 125 0.21%
49 voro 124 0.21%
50 äro 124 0.21%
51 något 123 0.21%
52 upp 123 0.21%
53 detta 119 0.2%
54 hans 114 0.19%
55 alla 113 0.19%
56 vad 112 0.19%
57 mycket 109 0.18%
58 vid 109 0.18%
59 barn 108 0.18%
60 två 108 0.18%
61 utan 108 0.18%
62 år 106 0.18%
63 in 103 0.17%
64 min 101 0.17%
65 andra 98 0.17%
66 shilling 98 0.17%
67 oss 98 0.17%
68 denna 93 0.16%
69 också 92 0.16%
70 komma 91 0.15%
71 sina 90 0.15%
72 vara 89 0.15%
73 efter 88 0.15%
74 bli 88 0.15%
75 hela 86 0.15%
76 här 86 0.15%
77 kom 86 0.15%
78 ni 86 0.15%
79 kunna 86 0.15%
80 allt 84 0.14%
81 tre 83 0.14%
82 se 83 0.14%
83 ned 82 0.14%
84 deras 80 0.14%
85 dessa 79 0.13%
86 sitt 78 0.13%
87 du 78 0.13%
88 män 77 0.13%
89 göra 77 0.13%
90 End 77 0.13%
91 rum 76 0.13%
92 gå 75 0.13%
93 någon 73 0.12%
94 medan 70 0.12%
95 vilka 69 0.12%
96 icke 69 0.12%
97 hur 69 0.12%
98 får 68 0.12%
99 genom 66 0.11%
100 East 66 0.11%
101 människor 65 0.11%
102 blivit 64 0.11%
103 litet 63 0.11%
104 London 63 0.11%
105 sex 62 0.11%
106 varje 62 0.11%
107 mera 62 0.11%
108 nu 62 0.11%
109 såg 62 0.11%
110 sätt 61 0.1%
111 när 61 0.1%
112 varit 61 0.1%
113 vill 60 0.1%
114 mot 59 0.1%
115 finns 59 0.1%
116 dock 58 0.1%
117 fem 57 0.1%
118 dag 57 0.1%
119 arbetare 56 0.09%
120 veckan 56 0.09%
121 ty 56 0.09%
122 många 55 0.09%
123 några 55 0.09%
124 ännu 55 0.09%
125 själv 55 0.09%
126 aldrig 55 0.09%
127 samma 54 0.09%
128 kvinnor 53 0.09%
129 blir 53 0.09%
130 gick 53 0.09%
131 hennes 53 0.09%
132 mitt 53 0.09%
133 kommer 53 0.09%
134 kvinna 53 0.09%
135 fick 52 0.09%
136 skall 52 0.09%
137 blev 51 0.09%
138 mat 50 0.08%
139 enda 50 0.08%
140 leva 49 0.08%
141 små 48 0.08%
142 åt 47 0.08%
143 sedan 47 0.08%
144 därför 46 0.08%
145 frågade 46 0.08%
146 gång 46 0.08%
147 annat 45 0.08%
148 bort 45 0.08%
149 mina 45 0.08%
150 pence 44 0.07%
151 fall 44 0.07%
152 mindre 44 0.07%
153 ju 43 0.07%
154 folk 43 0.07%
155 hustru 43 0.07%
156 äta 42 0.07%
157 kläder 42 0.07%
158 tio 42 0.07%
159 gatan 42 0.07%
160 henne 41 0.07%
161 bröd 41 0.07%
162 omkring 40 0.07%
163 fyra 40 0.07%
164 annan 39 0.07%
165 gamla 39 0.07%
166 stod 39 0.07%
167 hem 39 0.07%
168 ur 38 0.06%
169 förklarade 38 0.06%
170 hos 38 0.06%
171 lika 38 0.06%
172 goda 38 0.06%
173 ta 38 0.06%
174 följande 37 0.06%
175 dö 37 0.06%
176 säga 37 0.06%
177 fanns 37 0.06%
178 går 37 0.06%
179 ingen 36 0.06%
180 väl 36 0.06%
181 par 36 0.06%

This list excludes punctuation or single-letter words, also some different-case repeats of the same words.

If you think the text would be accessible to you, you can read it on our site (click on the cover to access):

Cover of Avgrundens folk (Norden) by Jack London

Other resources and languages

If you like this analysis, you should have a look at out our lists of Swedish short stories and Swedish books.

If you like literature as a means to learn languages - please take a look at our project Interlinear Books. We even have a Swedish Interlinear book available for purchase.