Där ute. Skisser by Henning Berger : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Där ute. Skisser for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 25,492, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Där ute. Skisser to have a difficulty score of 67. Here're its scores:

Measure Score
easy difficult (1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty 67% 67
Vocabulary Difficulty 85% 85
Grammatical Difficulty 50% 50

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

85%

Vocabulary difficulty: 85%

This score has been calculated based on frequency vocabulary (the top most frequently used words in Swedish). It combines various measures of Där ute. Skisser'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 Där ute. Skisser:

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for Där ute. Skisser: a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Där ute. Skisser:

Measure Score
Measure Score
Number of words 25,492
Number of unique words 6,830
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities 840
Number of very rare non-entity words 1,417
Number of sentences 4,418
Average number of words/sentence 6

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 6,693 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Där ute. Skisser without a dictionary and fully understand it.

Grammatical Difficulty: Breakdown

50%

Grammatical difficulty: 50%

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) 0.267927
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR) 0.0000105102
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR) 0.00000525512
MTLD Index 67
HDD Index 64
Yule's I Index 67
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I) 66

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Där ute. Skisser is 0.267927. 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 6,830, while the number of words is 25,492, so the TTR is 6,830 / 25,492 = 0.267927. 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, 6,830 / (25,492 * 25,492) = 0.0000105102), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 6,830 / 2 * (25,492 * 25,492) = 0.00000525512). 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 66 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 50.

Other Information about Där ute. Skisser by Henning Berger

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Där ute. Skisser is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

Skål!» »Jaså», fortsatte hon, »ni orkar ej prata, var lugn, jag är allt den sista som skulle fordra det af en medmänniska, hur som hälst, att få se en landsman är ett lagom intermezzo — utan repliker.» »Tack», sade jag för att säga något (uppriktigt sagdt hade jag väntat litet mera alldag-lighet) »jag tror jag förstår er ty jag har också gått igenom ett visst program, men innan värt intermezzo är öfver så kan ni ju säga litet själf ...» Hon afbröt ånyo: »Dumheter, vi ha intet att säga hvarandra — det är just det tråkiga. Att jag icke heter »Fanchetti», det förstår ni väl (hon nämnde sitt värkliga namn, ett vanligt svenskt) och att Ellen och jag flacka omkring här ute mot en ...

Top most frequently used words in Där ute. Skisser by Henning Berger*

Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
1 och 1,035 4.06%
2 en 483 1.89%
3 jag 408 1.6%
4 det 402 1.58%
5 han 396 1.55%
6 att 363 1.42%
7 306 1.2%
8 som 287 1.13%
9 den 243 0.95%
10 var 217 0.85%
11 med 212 0.83%
12 till 209 0.82%
13 ett 192 0.75%
14 är 189 0.74%
15 de 187 0.73%
16 för 179 0.7%
17 af 178 0.7%
18 169 0.66%
19 ej 153 0.6%
20 sig 151 0.59%
21 mig 150 0.59%
22 hade 126 0.49%
23 men 126 0.49%
24 om 117 0.46%
25 där 99 0.39%
26 honom 99 0.39%
27 hans 98 0.38%
28 sin 94 0.37%
29 öfver 87 0.34%
30 nu 81 0.32%
31 76 0.3%
32 har 75 0.29%
33 du 75 0.29%
34 min 73 0.29%
35 skulle 70 0.27%
36 ni 68 0.27%
37 hvad 67 0.26%
38 här 66 0.26%
39 in 62 0.24%
40 man 62 0.24%
41 vid 61 0.24%
42 upp 60 0.24%
43 allt 60 0.24%
44 ut 58 0.23%
45 något 58 0.23%
46 eller 57 0.22%
47 inte 55 0.22%
48 från 54 0.21%
49 kom 51 0.2%
50 alla 49 0.19%
51 säga 48 0.19%
52 under 47 0.18%
53 ned 46 0.18%
54 efter 46 0.18%
55 detta 44 0.17%
56 såg 43 0.17%
57 icke 42 0.16%
58 stora 42 0.16%
59 skall 42 0.16%
60 alltid 41 0.16%
61 mycket 41 0.16%
62 vara 41 0.16%
63 vi 41 0.16%
64 kan 40 0.16%
65 själf 40 0.16%
66 kunde 40 0.16%
67 när 39 0.15%
68 år 38 0.15%
69 ju 36 0.14%
70 Larson 35 0.14%
71 än 34 0.13%
72 sina 33 0.13%
73 andra 33 0.13%
74 nog 32 0.13%
75 32 0.13%
76 ute 32 0.13%
77 vill 32 0.13%
78 litet 32 0.13%
79 sitt 31 0.12%
80 någon 31 0.12%
81 varit 31 0.12%
82 gick 30 0.12%
83 er 30 0.12%
84 denna 30 0.12%
85 30 0.12%
86 också 30 0.12%
87 hur 30 0.12%
88 mot 30 0.12%
89 går 29 0.11%
90 utan 29 0.11%
91 se 29 0.11%
92 gång 29 0.11%
93 äro 29 0.11%
94 sade 29 0.11%
95 blef 28 0.11%
96 hon 28 0.11%
97 hem 27 0.11%
98 mitt 27 0.11%
99 tänkte 27 0.11%
100 lilla 26 0.1%
101 ser 26 0.1%
102 låg 25 0.1%
103 två 24 0.09%
104 mina 24 0.09%
105 dock 24 0.09%
106 väl 24 0.09%
107 genom 24 0.09%
108 ur 23 0.09%
109 ännu 23 0.09%
110 kanske 23 0.09%
111 dag 23 0.09%
112 mer 23 0.09%
113 fram 23 0.09%
114 hela 22 0.09%
115 igen 22 0.09%
116 vet 22 0.09%
117 voro 22 0.09%
118 endast 21 0.08%
119 Chicago 21 0.08%
120 ty 21 0.08%
121 fick 21 0.08%
122 åt 21 0.08%
123 satt 20 0.08%
124 redan 20 0.08%
125 långt 20 0.08%
126 arbete 20 0.08%
127 komma 20 0.08%
128 började 20 0.08%
129 aldrig 19 0.07%
130 bort 19 0.07%
131 Ja 19 0.07%
132 kände 19 0.07%
133 Chevelli 19 0.07%
134 gjorde 19 0.07%
135 visste 19 0.07%
136 människor 19 0.07%
137 samma 18 0.07%
138 sista 18 0.07%
139 förstår 18 0.07%
140 måste 18 0.07%
141 Bullock 18 0.07%
142 ingen 18 0.07%
143 vidare 18 0.07%
144 intet 17 0.07%
145 några 17 0.07%
146 hvilka 17 0.07%
147 ha 17 0.07%
148 ändå 17 0.07%
149 gamla 17 0.07%
150 tog 17 0.07%
151 bara 17 0.07%
152 får 17 0.07%
153 hvita 17 0.07%
154 små 17 0.07%
155 göra 17 0.07%
156 tala 16 0.06%
157 stod 16 0.06%
158 röda 16 0.06%
159 nästan 16 0.06%
160 kommer 16 0.06%
161 leende 16 0.06%
162 sen 16 0.06%
163 morgon 16 0.06%
164 omkring 16 0.06%
165 dem 16 0.06%
166 tio 15 0.06%
167 gatan 15 0.06%
168 glas 15 0.06%
169 fem 15 0.06%
170 plötsligt 15 0.06%
171 ögonen 15 0.06%
172 hos 15 0.06%
173 midt 15 0.06%
174 Wikert 15 0.06%
175 dörren 15 0.06%
176 liten 14 0.05%
177 hvarje 14 0.05%
178 par 14 0.05%
179 land 14 0.05%
180 mr 14 0.05%
181 dig 14 0.05%

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 Där ute. Skisser by Henning Berger

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.