Fru Catharina Boije och hennes Döttrar. En berättelse från stora ofredens tid by Fredrika Runeberg : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Fru Catharina Boije och hennes Döttrar. En berättelse från stora ofredens tid for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 55,656, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Fru Catharina Boije och hennes Döttrar. En berättelse från stora ofredens tid to have a difficulty score of 68. Here're its scores:

Measure Score
easy difficult (1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty 68% 68
Vocabulary Difficulty 82% 82
Grammatical Difficulty 54% 54

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

82%

Vocabulary difficulty: 82%

This score has been calculated based on frequency vocabulary (the top most frequently used words in Swedish). It combines various measures of Fru Catharina Boije och hennes Döttrar. En berättelse från stora ofredens tid'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 Fru Catharina Boije och hennes Döttrar. En berättelse från stora ofredens tid:

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for Fru Catharina Boije och hennes Döttrar. En berättelse från stora ofredens tid: a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Fru Catharina Boije och hennes Döttrar. En berättelse från stora ofredens tid:

Measure Score
Measure Score
Number of words 55,656
Number of unique words 9,804
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities 2,607
Number of very rare non-entity words 3,613
Number of sentences 7,782
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 9,607 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Fru Catharina Boije och hennes Döttrar. En berättelse från stora ofredens tid without a dictionary and fully understand it.

Grammatical Difficulty: Breakdown

54%

Grammatical difficulty: 54%

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) 0.176154
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR) 0.00000316504
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR) 0.00000158252
MTLD Index 69
HDD Index 68
Yule's I Index 79
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I) 72

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Fru Catharina Boije och hennes Döttrar. En berättelse från stora ofredens tid is 0.176154. 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 9,804, while the number of words is 55,656, so the TTR is 9,804 / 55,656 = 0.176154. 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, 9,804 / (55,656 * 55,656) = 0.00000316504), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 9,804 / 2 * (55,656 * 55,656) = 0.00000158252). 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 72 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 54.

Other Information about Fru Catharina Boije och hennes Döttrar. En berättelse från stora ofredens tid by Fredrika Runeberg

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Fru Catharina Boije och hennes Döttrar. En berättelse från stora ofredens tid is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

Vi stego i höjden uppför snöfjellen, och vidt omkring oss sågo vi endast snö och is. Icke en menniskoboning, icke ens ett enstaka träd syntes. Endast på afstånd brusade hafvet svart och ödsligt, och der bortöfver låg himmelen lika svart och dyster. Men nu steg den svarta molnväggen högre, ilande foro snöhvirflar omkring, och innan kort dånade stormen som en åska omkring oss, förandes med sig en snöyra, som hindrade en hvar att ens sin närmaste grannekanna skönja. Hvad som blef af våra vägvisare vet jag ej, hvar och en slräfvade så godt han kunde, och hördes nästan intet ljud af folkel, utan tego alla och stretade framåt. Den, som tröttnade, var ohjelpligen förlorad i kölden och snön. Slutligen inbröt natten, görande fasan ännu större. ...

Top most frequently used words in Fru Catharina Boije och hennes Döttrar. En berättelse från stora ofredens tid by Fredrika Runeberg*

Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
1 och 1,882 3.38%
2 att 1,413 2.54%
3 jag 968 1.74%
4 en 716 1.29%
5 det 697 1.25%
6 som 654 1.18%
7 till 608 1.09%
8 med 589 1.06%
9 af 582 1.05%
10 566 1.02%
11 för 556 1%
12 hon 556 1%
13 den 541 0.97%
14 507 0.91%
15 sig 478 0.86%
16 mig 449 0.81%
17 ej 426 0.77%
18 de 392 0.7%
19 han 381 0.68%
20 men 364 0.65%
21 nu 349 0.63%
22 var 349 0.63%
23 om 349 0.63%
24 är 309 0.56%
25 hade 288 0.52%
26 ett 273 0.49%
27 Margaretha 258 0.46%
28 icke 258 0.46%
29 henne 244 0.44%
30 vi 239 0.43%
31 du 228 0.41%
32 min 226 0.41%
33 212 0.38%
34 sin 209 0.38%
35 sade 195 0.35%
36 skulle 194 0.35%
37 har 182 0.33%
38 der 181 0.33%
39 hennes 181 0.33%
40 dock 172 0.31%
41 än 170 0.31%
42 Cecilia 168 0.3%
43 dig 165 0.3%
44 honom 159 0.29%
45 denna 157 0.28%
46 oss 156 0.28%
47 Catharina 151 0.27%
48 man 141 0.25%
49 vid 139 0.25%
50 fru 139 0.25%
51 vara 135 0.24%
52 dem 132 0.24%
53 väl 130 0.23%
54 128 0.23%
55 44 124 0.22%
56 skall 119 0.21%
57 ännu 117 0.21%
58 utan 116 0.21%
59 sedan 115 0.21%
60 åt 114 0.2%
61 kunde 113 0.2%
62 hvad 109 0.2%
63 kan 108 0.19%
64 här 108 0.19%
65 se 107 0.19%
66 öfver 105 0.19%
67 alla 104 0.19%
68 sina 103 0.19%
69 från 103 0.19%
70 måste 101 0.18%
71 ock 98 0.18%
72 allt 97 0.17%
73 under 91 0.16%
74 någon 90 0.16%
75 åter 90 0.16%
76 efter 89 0.16%
77 Carl 89 0.16%
78 detta 89 0.16%
79 hans 87 0.16%
80 endast 84 0.15%
81 Johan 84 0.15%
82 ni 81 0.15%
83 alt 80 0.14%
84 något 79 0.14%
85 några 79 0.14%
86 mycket 78 0.14%
87 er 76 0.14%
88 sjelf 76 0.14%
89 ville 75 0.13%
90 varit 74 0.13%
91 upp 72 0.13%
92 mitt 72 0.13%
93 sitt 71 0.13%
94 göra 70 0.13%
95 snart 69 0.12%
96 hvilken 69 0.12%
97 emot 68 0.12%
98 mera 68 0.12%
99 ur 68 0.12%
100 eller 67 0.12%
101 kunna 66 0.12%
102 huru 66 0.12%
103 vill 65 0.12%
104 din 65 0.12%
105 ju 64 0.11%
106 mor 64 0.11%
107 genom 64 0.11%
108 ty 64 0.11%
109 intet 64 0.11%
110 ingen 64 0.11%
111 började 63 0.11%
112 gick 62 0.11%
113 ha 62 0.11%
114 hos 62 0.11%
115 vår 61 0.11%
116 blef 61 0.11%
117 hjerta 61 0.11%
118 in 60 0.11%
119 for 60 0.11%
120 andra 59 0.11%
121 vore 57 0.1%
122 vet 57 0.1%
123 ord 57 0.1%
124 när 57 0.1%
125 äfven 56 0.1%
126 kom 56 0.1%
127 blifvit 55 0.1%
128 komma 55 0.1%
129 ut 53 0.1%
130 mina 52 0.09%
131 redan 52 0.09%
132 51 0.09%
133 ehuru 50 0.09%
134 landet 50 0.09%
135 hafva 49 0.09%
136 dess 48 0.09%
137 dag 48 0.09%
138 steg 48 0.09%
139 unga 47 0.08%
140 Gud 47 0.08%
141 hem 46 0.08%
142 barn 46 0.08%
143 tid 46 0.08%
144 voro 45 0.08%
145 45 0.08%
146 mot 45 0.08%
147 fram 44 0.08%
148 deras 44 0.08%
149 svarade 44 0.08%
150 just 44 0.08%
151 äro 44 0.08%
152 hela 43 0.08%
153 gång 43 0.08%
154 såg 43 0.08%
155 båda 43 0.08%
156 länge 43 0.08%
157 kanske 42 0.08%
158 annat 42 0.08%
159 sålunda 42 0.08%
160 eder 41 0.07%
161 mer 40 0.07%
162 kunnat 40 0.07%
163 dotter 40 0.07%
164 fröken 40 0.07%
165 stod 39 0.07%
166 Sverige 39 0.07%
167 många 39 0.07%
168 dessa 39 0.07%
169 bort 39 0.07%
170 11 38 0.07%
171 Magnus 38 0.07%
172 kände 37 0.07%
173 nog 37 0.07%
174 säga 37 0.07%
175 blott 37 0.07%
176 Finland 37 0.07%
177 litet 36 0.06%
178 år 36 0.06%
179 alltid 35 0.06%
180 innan 35 0.06%
181 lätt 35 0.06%
182 gamla 35 0.06%
183 rätt 34 0.06%
184 aldrig 34 0.06%
185 våra 33 0.06%
186 ändå 33 0.06%
187 ja 33 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 Fru Catharina Boije och hennes Döttrar. En berättelse från stora ofredens tid by Fredrika Runeberg

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.