Literature analysis for language learners: Finlands historia från den äldsta tiden intill våra dagar by Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen

Finlands historia från den äldsta tiden intill våra dagar by Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Finlands historia från den äldsta tiden intill våra dagar for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 104,288, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Finlands historia från den äldsta tiden intill våra dagar to have a difficulty score of 83. Here're its scores:

Measure Score
easy difficult (1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty 83% 83
Vocabulary Difficulty 96% 96
Grammatical Difficulty 70% 70

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

96%

Vocabulary difficulty: 96%

This score has been calculated based on frequency vocabulary (the top most frequently used words in Swedish). It combines various measures of Finlands historia från den äldsta tiden intill våra dagar'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 Finlands historia från den äldsta tiden intill våra dagar:

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for Finlands historia från den äldsta tiden intill våra dagar: a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Finlands historia från den äldsta tiden intill våra dagar:

Measure Score
Measure Score
Number of words 104,288
Number of unique words 16,932
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities 8,245
Number of very rare non-entity words 10,883
Number of sentences 14,751
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 16,593 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Finlands historia från den äldsta tiden intill våra dagar without a dictionary and fully understand it.

Grammatical Difficulty: Breakdown

70%

Grammatical difficulty: 70%

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 8
Coleman-Liau Index 12
Type/Token Ratio (TTR) 0.162358
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR) 0.00000155682
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR) 0.000000778412
MTLD Index 92
HDD Index 71
Yule's I Index 87
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I) 83

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Finlands historia från den äldsta tiden intill våra dagar is 0.162358. 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 16,932, while the number of words is 104,288, so the TTR is 16,932 / 104,288 = 0.162358. 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, 16,932 / (104,288 * 104,288) = 0.00000155682), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 16,932 / 2 * (104,288 * 104,288) = 0.000000778412). 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 8, making it understandable for 8-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 83 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 70.

Other Information about Finlands historia från den äldsta tiden intill våra dagar by Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Finlands historia från den äldsta tiden intill våra dagar is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

Karl Knutssons tider, 1438—1470 75. Tredje Tidskiftet. Sturarnes tid och slutet af unionen, 1470—1523. 6. De första åren af Sten Sture den äldres regering 83. 7. Det stora ryska kriget 87. 8. Svante Stures och Hemming Gadds regering 93. 9. Sten Sture den yngres regering och slutet af unionstiden 96. 10. Återblick på katolska tiden i Finland 103. IV. Reformationstiden, 1523—1617. 1. Gustaf Vasas regering, 1523—1560; Reformationen 116. 2. Gustaf Vasas regering, 1523—1560; de politiska förhållandena 124. ...

Top most frequently used words in Finlands historia från den äldsta tiden intill våra dagar by Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen*

Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
1 och 3,612 3.46%
2 till 1,855 1.78%
3 att 1,573 1.51%
4 af 1,435 1.38%
5 den 1,306 1.25%
6 en 1,110 1.06%
7 de 1,105 1.06%
8 på 1,009 0.97%
9 som 988 0.95%
10 hade 913 0.88%
11 med 899 0.86%
12 var 816 0.78%
13 för 814 0.78%
14 det 766 0.73%
15 sig 732 0.7%
16 vid 534 0.51%
17 Men 533 0.51%
18 från 521 0.5%
19 år 513 0.49%
20 ett 505 0.48%
21 man 488 0.47%
22 äfven 488 0.47%
23 han 478 0.46%
24 under 452 0.43%
25 sin 449 0.43%
26 ej 425 0.41%
27 denna 422 0.4%
28 om 393 0.38%
29 Finland 373 0.36%
30 nu 369 0.35%
31 finska 353 0.34%
32 skulle 329 0.32%
33 detta 325 0.31%
34 sitt 296 0.28%
35 redan 291 0.28%
36 så 289 0.28%
37 sina 277 0.27%
38 då 269 0.26%
39 tid 266 0.26%
40 Sverige 266 0.26%
41 dessa 256 0.25%
42 åt 255 0.24%
43 svenska 253 0.24%
44 öfver 249 0.24%
45 hans 247 0.24%
46 ännu 238 0.23%
47 genom 233 0.22%
48 voro 224 0.21%
49 Finlands 222 0.21%
50 efter 222 0.21%
51 emot 211 0.2%
52 Åbo 202 0.19%
53 eller 201 0.19%
54 åter 193 0.19%
55 blef 192 0.18%
56 hvilka 192 0.18%
57 blifvit 183 0.18%
58 andra 179 0.17%
59 samma 179 0.17%
60 hela 176 0.17%
61 såsom 174 0.17%
62 dem 173 0.17%
63 alla 168 0.16%
64 der 163 0.16%
65 konungen 161 0.15%
66 likväl 160 0.15%
67 är 156 0.15%
68 än 154 0.15%
69 Gustaf 154 0.15%
70 varit 154 0.15%
71 hafva 153 0.15%
72 ryska 148 0.14%
73 begynte 144 0.14%
74 hvilken 143 0.14%
75 allt 142 0.14%
76 sålunda 137 0.13%
77 Karl 137 0.13%
78 honom 137 0.13%
79 sjelfva 135 0.13%
80 kunde 132 0.13%
81 början 131 0.13%
82 samt 128 0.12%
83 icke 128 0.12%
84 dess 126 0.12%
85 första 126 0.12%
86 nya 124 0.12%
87 deras 122 0.12%
88 utan 121 0.12%
89 slutligen 121 0.12%
90 hadc 121 0.12%
91 någon 120 0.12%
92 gjorde 118 0.11%
93 synes 118 0.11%
94 Sveriges 113 0.11%
95 några 113 0.11%
96 landet 111 0.11%
97 landets 111 0.11%
98 endast 110 0.11%
99 tillbaka 108 0.1%
100 mot 106 0.1%
101 dock 105 0.1%
102 kom 105 0.1%
103 hvars 105 0.1%
104 biskop 101 0.1%
105 konung 100 0.1%
106 gång 100 0.1%
107 sjelf 98 0.09%
108 fick 97 0.09%
109 ty 97 0.09%
110 konungens 96 0.09%
111 flere 96 0.09%
112 regeringen 96 0.09%
113 öfriga 95 0.09%
114 sedan 93 0.09%
115 kriget 93 0.09%
116 ända 92 0.09%
117 Erik 92 0.09%
118 slott 91 0.09%
119 mycket 90 0.09%
120 sätt 89 0.09%
121 emellan 88 0.08%
122 del 88 0.08%
123 sidan 85 0.08%
124 bland 84 0.08%
125 hvilket 83 0.08%
126 något 83 0.08%
127 nämligen 82 0.08%
128 mera 81 0.08%
129 vi 81 0.08%
130 här 79 0.08%
131 såväl 79 0.08%
132 slutet 78 0.07%
133 vara 77 0.07%
134 län 77 0.07%
135 Ryssland 76 0.07%
136 Stockholm 76 0.07%
137 hären 76 0.07%
138 namn 75 0.07%
139 ifrån 73 0.07%
140 först 72 0.07%
141 regering 72 0.07%
142 förut 72 0.07%
143 följande 72 0.07%
144 land 71 0.07%
145 ehuru 69 0.07%
146 fått 69 0.07%
147 stor 69 0.07%
148 stora 68 0.07%
149 Danmark 67 0.06%
150 Magnus 66 0.06%
151 uti 66 0.06%
152 senare 65 0.06%
153 Johan 65 0.06%
154 större 65 0.06%
155 folket 64 0.06%
156 sida 64 0.06%
157 göra 64 0.06%
158 staden 63 0.06%
159 ryssarne 63 0.06%
160 derför 63 0.06%
161 många 63 0.06%
162 har 62 0.06%
163 mer 62 0.06%
164 område 61 0.06%
165 ganska 61 0.06%
166 få 61 0.06%
167 folk 61 0.06%
168 nödgades 60 0.06%
169 snart 60 0.06%
170 krig 60 0.06%
171 hos 60 0.06%
172 ställning 60 0.06%
173 riket 59 0.06%
174 försökte 59 0.06%
175 började 59 0.06%
176 tre 58 0.06%
177 omkring 58 0.06%
178 delen 57 0.05%
179 tiden 56 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 Finlands historia från den äldsta tiden intill våra dagar by Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen

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.