Denna flugiga värld by Ludvig Nordström : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Denna flugiga värld for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 84,701, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Denna flugiga värld to have a difficulty score of 64. Here're its scores:

Measure Score
easy difficult (1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty 64% 64
Vocabulary Difficulty 77% 77
Grammatical Difficulty 51% 51

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

77%

Vocabulary difficulty: 77%

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

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for Denna flugiga värld: a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Denna flugiga värld:

Measure Score
Measure Score
Number of words 84,701
Number of unique words 15,948
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities 3,716
Number of very rare non-entity words 5,270
Number of sentences 12,841
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 15,629 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Denna flugiga värld without a dictionary and fully understand it.

Grammatical Difficulty: Breakdown

51%

Grammatical difficulty: 51%

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) 0.188286
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR) 0.00000222295
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR) 0.00000111147
MTLD Index 66
HDD Index 65
Yule's I Index 70
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I) 67

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Denna flugiga värld is 0.188286. 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 15,948, while the number of words is 84,701, so the TTR is 15,948 / 84,701 = 0.188286. 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, 15,948 / (84,701 * 84,701) = 0.00000222295), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 15,948 / 2 * (84,701 * 84,701) = 0.00000111147). 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 67 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 51.

Other Information about Denna flugiga värld by Ludvig Nordström

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Denna flugiga värld is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

Det är ett sådant där ljust rum, i vitt, där man känner sig ung eller minns sin ungdom, dess drömmar och spontana glädje att leva. Tänk, världen före världskriget! Då det militära var vaktparader och dans på krigsfartygens akterdäck! Och nu! 86 LUDVIG . NORDSTRÖM Och då Sågverks-Norrland var så gyllene som det grova timmer, som nu börjar tryta! Nog har min generation fått se åtskilligt! Jag tycker fortfarande, det är förbaskat roligt att leva. Fast ibland känner man ju, att det skall bli skönt att få lägga sig och göra paus ett tag till nästa liv. Det är väl det, att jag är och alltid varit övertygad om ett evigt liv, som gör, att jag tycker ...

Top most frequently used words in Denna flugiga värld by Ludvig Nordström*

Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
1 och 3,078 3.63%
2 det 1,528 1.8%
3 jag 1,426 1.68%
4 1,385 1.64%
5 en 1,376 1.62%
6 som 1,341 1.58%
7 att 1,150 1.36%
8 är 911 1.08%
9 den 884 1.04%
10 med 840 0.99%
11 var 762 0.9%
12 till 748 0.88%
13 av 741 0.87%
14 för 698 0.82%
15 548 0.65%
16 inte 536 0.63%
17 vi 510 0.6%
18 har 495 0.58%
19 om 491 0.58%
20 han 469 0.55%
21 man 459 0.54%
22 ett 444 0.52%
23 de 443 0.52%
24 mig 406 0.48%
25 här 406 0.48%
26 från 365 0.43%
27 352 0.42%
28 men 350 0.41%
29 sig 335 0.4%
30 hade 333 0.39%
31 nu 308 0.36%
32 där 297 0.35%
33 ha 297 0.35%
34 ut 251 0.3%
35 upp 242 0.29%
36 skulle 229 0.27%
37 över 214 0.25%
38 eller 211 0.25%
39 Kl 208 0.25%
40 min 204 0.24%
41 hela 198 0.23%
42 in 194 0.23%
43 vid 184 0.22%
44 bara 171 0.2%
45 Ja 162 0.19%
46 NORDSTRÖM 157 0.19%
47 LUDVIG 157 0.19%
48 kan 155 0.18%
49 oss 155 0.18%
50 vad 154 0.18%
51 alla 153 0.18%
52 under 152 0.18%
53 denna 149 0.18%
54 varit 146 0.17%
55 sen 144 0.17%
56 mot 143 0.17%
57 141 0.17%
58 sin 136 0.16%
59 Calle 133 0.16%
60 vara 128 0.15%
61 än 127 0.15%
62 efter 122 0.14%
63 ju 122 0.14%
64 just 119 0.14%
65 detta 117 0.14%
66 kom 116 0.14%
67 sa 112 0.13%
68 också 111 0.13%
69 aldrig 111 0.13%
70 utan 111 0.13%
71 honom 110 0.13%
72 något 108 0.13%
73 gång 107 0.13%
74 ner 107 0.13%
75 blev 105 0.12%
76 genom 105 0.12%
77 mitt 104 0.12%
78 mer 103 0.12%
79 lite 103 0.12%
80 fick 101 0.12%
81 när 99 0.12%
82 mycket 99 0.12%
83 se 97 0.11%
84 Härnösand 96 0.11%
85 ute 95 0.11%
86 allt 94 0.11%
87 kommer 94 0.11%
88 dag 93 0.11%
89 ur 92 0.11%
90 dem 92 0.11%
91 år 91 0.11%
92 äro 90 0.11%
93 skall 89 0.11%
94 uppe 89 0.11%
95 kunde 88 0.1%
96 tiden 88 0.1%
97 dessa 87 0.1%
98 första 86 0.1%
99 får 84 0.1%
100 icke 83 0.1%
101 gamla 82 0.1%
102 ska 82 0.1%
103 hans 81 0.1%
104 liv 80 0.09%
105 andra 77 0.09%
106 hur 75 0.09%
107 Stockholm 74 0.09%
108 går 74 0.09%
109 måste 73 0.09%
110 stora 73 0.09%
111 Öregrund 72 0.09%
112 fram 71 0.08%
113 mellan 71 0.08%
114 ser 70 0.08%
115 väl 70 0.08%
116 sitt 69 0.08%
117 fått 69 0.08%
118 del 69 0.08%
119 alltid 69 0.08%
120 Jansson 69 0.08%
121 någon 69 0.08%
122 kanske 68 0.08%
123 sjön 68 0.08%
124 komma 68 0.08%
125 Norrland 68 0.08%
126 kunna 67 0.08%
127 bli 67 0.08%
128 såg 67 0.08%
129 Sverige 67 0.08%
130 dess 66 0.08%
131 du 65 0.08%
132 65 0.08%
133 gubben 65 0.08%
134 sätt 64 0.08%
135 alltså 64 0.08%
136 havet 63 0.07%
137 samma 61 0.07%
138 sina 60 0.07%
139 två 60 0.07%
140 säga 60 0.07%
141 finns 59 0.07%
142 själv 59 0.07%
143 gick 59 0.07%
144 land 59 0.07%
145 ligga 59 0.07%
146 vet 58 0.07%
147 tid 58 0.07%
148 stån 57 0.07%
149 kommit 55 0.06%
150 minns 55 0.06%
151 sedan 54 0.06%
152 Sundsvall 54 0.06%
153 par 53 0.06%
154 liten 53 0.06%
155 voro 53 0.06%
156 sett 53 0.06%
157 vill 53 0.06%
158 alldeles 53 0.06%
159 säger 52 0.06%
160 haft 51 0.06%
161 låg 51 0.06%
162 några 51 0.06%
163 annat 51 0.06%
164 gången 50 0.06%
165 rätt 50 0.06%
166 liksom 50 0.06%
167 ligger 50 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 Denna flugiga värld by Ludvig Nordström

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.