Carl von Linnés lefnadsminnen Tecknade af honom sjelf by : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Carl von Linnés lefnadsminnen Tecknade af honom sjelf for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 48,547, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Carl von Linnés lefnadsminnen Tecknade af honom sjelf to have a difficulty score of 81. Here're its scores:

Measure		Score
	easy difficult	(1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty	81%	81
Vocabulary Difficulty	93%	93
Grammatical Difficulty	69%	69

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

93%

Vocabulary difficulty: 93%

This score has been calculated based on frequency vocabulary (the top most frequently used words in Swedish). It combines various measures of Carl von Linnés lefnadsminnen Tecknade af honom sjelf'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 Carl von Linnés lefnadsminnen Tecknade af honom sjelf:

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Carl von Linnés lefnadsminnen Tecknade af honom sjelf:

Measure	Score
Measure	Score
Number of words	48,547
Number of unique words	11,142
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities	2,574
Number of very rare non-entity words	4,181
Number of sentences	3,184
Average number of words/sentence	15

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 10,919 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Carl von Linnés lefnadsminnen Tecknade af honom sjelf without a dictionary and fully understand it.

Grammatical Difficulty: Breakdown

69%

Grammatical difficulty: 69%

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	10
Coleman-Liau Index	12
Type/Token Ratio (TTR)	0.22951
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR)	0.00000472757
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR)	0.00000236379
MTLD Index	73
HDD Index	71
Yule's I Index	90
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I)	78

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Carl von Linnés lefnadsminnen Tecknade af honom sjelf is 0.22951. 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 11,142, while the number of words is 48,547, so the TTR is 11,142 / 48,547 = 0.22951. 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, 11,142 / (48,547 * 48,547) = 0.00000472757), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 11,142 / 2 * (48,547 * 48,547) = 0.00000236379). 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:

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 10, making it understandable for 10-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:

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 78 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 69.

Other Information about Carl von Linnés lefnadsminnen Tecknade af honom sjelf by

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Carl von Linnés lefnadsminnen Tecknade af honom sjelf is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

Då Linné ej kommer tillbaka i vanlig tid, blir hans hemmavarande familj orolig och skickar bud på alla håll att söka efter honom. En af dessa hade då den lyckan att träffa honom på Säfja, der han fans liggande i bondstugan framför en stor eldbrasa ganska förnöjd på sin slädfäll och med sin lilla pipa i mun. Den utskickade hade icke endast stor svårighet att få honom ifrån detta kära ställe, der han ovilkorligen ville tillbringa natten, utan ock mycket bekymmer att föra honom väl och lyckligen hem, sedan det blifvit mörkt och töväder börjat i förening med hällregn. Efter den färden kom Linné aldrig utom staden och få gånger utom sitt hus. Hans lifstid blef sedan icke heller lång, ty knapt mer än nio dagar af år 1778 hade förflutit, innan han, mätt af ålder och ära, somnade af från alla sina plågor. »Linnés bisättning i Upsala domkyrka», säger Afzelius, »var den högtidligaste akt jag sett och gjorde på mig ett djupt intryck. Det var en dyster och tyst afton, hvars mörker endast skingrades på stället af den genom staden långsamt tågande processionens facklor, bloss och lanternor, och hvars lugn endast stördes af den på gatorna församlade folkmängdens dofva sorl och af den majestätiska storklockans grofva ljud, som, ehuru för Linné i lifstiden besvärligt, nu skulle första gången vid likbegängelser höras ensamt att på ovanligt sätt till grafven ledsaga en ovanlig man. — Det var en af hela akademistaten och ganska många främmande personer bestående talrik och lysande procession, som med biträde af flera medicine doktorer, alla Linnés fordna lärjungar, bortförde stoftet af denne store man, som, trotsande alla förhinder och allt motstånd, blott af egen kraft röjde sig väg upp till den i vetenskapernas rike högsta ära, att blifva en allmänt erkänd ny lagstiftare inom naturalhistoriens hela område, och hvars namn således aldrig skall dö, utan fortfara att alltid stå lysande i vetenskapens häfder och af hvarje sann naturkännare bibehållas i kär och vördnadsfull hågkomst till tidens slut.» Linnés personlighet i yttre och inre måtto skildras af arkiater Bäck sålunda; »Han var till växten något under vanlig längd, hvarken fet eller mager, af en stadig och fyllig kroppsbeskaffenhet, stinna ådror allt ifrån barndomen, stort hufvud och bakåt upphöjdt, med ett djupare tvärstreck emellan, som skilde den delen ifrån den främre: bruna och eldfulla ögon, skarp syn, god hörsel, dock ej för musik, på fötterna snäll och lätt, ett förträffligt minne till sextio års ålder, då förnamnen böjade undfalla honom; det var honom icke gifvet att lära språk, för den orsaken mindre nöjd med utländingar, som ej kunde tala latin. På latin uttryckte han sin mening fort, lätt, nogare och kortare än någon annan, när det ankom på naturaliers beskrifning; men för öfrigt gjorde han sig icke stor möda, allenast saken var med naturen öfverensstämmande. Det egna och intagande, som han hade i svenska bref till sina gynnare och vänner, kunde icke efterapas. Hans få tal röjde nog författarens qvickhet, tilltagsenhet, och vidsträckta kunskap, och skulle till äfventyrs icke anstått någon annan än Linné. Han sof ifrån kl. 10 till 3 sommartiden och vintertiden ifrån kl. 9 till 6; lemnade strax sitt arbete, när han kände sig trög och matt; ville gerna hafva godt sällskap om aftonen, der han var glad, skämtade och log hjerteligen.» Och en af Linnés lärjungar under åren 1763 och 1764, sedermera professorn Fabricius i Kiel, berättar härmed beslägtade, roande drag. »Två hela år», säger han, »hade jag njutit lyckan af hans undervisning, ledning och förtroliga umgänge. Ingen dag förflöt, då jag icke såg honom, i det jag dels bevistade hans föreläsningar, dels också tillbragte flera timmar i vänligt samtal med honom. Under sommaren följde vi honom ut på landet. Vi voro tillsammans tre utländingar, Kuhn (amerikanare), Zoega (dansk) och jag. ...

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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.

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