Gogol och djäfvulen - en studie by Dmitrij Merezjkovskij : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Gogol och djäfvulen - en studie for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 34,427, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Gogol och djäfvulen - en studie to have a difficulty score of 64. Here're its scores:

Measure Score
easy difficult (1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty 64% 64
Vocabulary Difficulty 75% 75
Grammatical Difficulty 53% 53

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

75%

Vocabulary difficulty: 75%

This score has been calculated based on frequency vocabulary (the top most frequently used words in Swedish). It combines various measures of Gogol och djäfvulen - en studie'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 Gogol och djäfvulen - en studie:

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for Gogol och djäfvulen  - en studie: a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Gogol och djäfvulen - en studie:

Measure Score
Measure Score
Number of words 34,427
Number of unique words 6,946
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities 1,445
Number of very rare non-entity words 1,793
Number of sentences 5,165
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 6,807 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Gogol och djäfvulen - en studie without a dictionary and fully understand it.

Grammatical Difficulty: Breakdown

53%

Grammatical difficulty: 53%

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 5
Coleman-Liau Index 8
Type/Token Ratio (TTR) 0.20176
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR) 0.00000586052
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR) 0.00000293026
MTLD Index 59
HDD Index 66
Yule's I Index 76
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I) 67

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Gogol och djäfvulen - en studie is 0.20176. 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 6,946, while the number of words is 34,427, so the TTR is 6,946 / 34,427 = 0.20176. 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, 6,946 / (34,427 * 34,427) = 0.00000586052), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 6,946 / 2 * (34,427 * 34,427) = 0.00000293026). 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 5, making it understandable for 5-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 53.

Other Information about Gogol och djäfvulen - en studie by Dmitrij Merezjkovskij

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Gogol och djäfvulen - en studie is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

Han är vän icke endast till Trjapischkin, Bulgarin, Senkovski, MarlinskiDe tre sistnämnda författare och samtida med Gogol. utan äfven till själfve Puschkin, kammarjunkarn. Under skepnad af någon elegant och förnäm dandy, comme il faut ut i fingerspetsarna, någon af Alexander Sergejevitsch’ oräkneliga »goda vänner», trycker han på hofbalerna dennes hand, förströdt och nedlåtande: »Nå hur står det till, bror?» — »Tja tja, det går som det vill, bror», svarar den andre... »Ett stort original den där!» Citatet är ur Revisorn, där Chlestakov på detta sätt skildrar ett sitt samtal med Puschkin. Och i den skvallerhistoria, som vållade Puschkins död, hade naturligtvis Ivan Alexandrovitsch Chlestakov sitt finger med. Puschkin dog, och ...

Top most frequently used words in Gogol och djäfvulen - en studie by Dmitrij Merezjkovskij*

Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
1 och 996 2.89%
2 att 593 1.72%
3 en 529 1.54%
4 som 526 1.53%
5 den 526 1.53%
6 det 522 1.52%
7 är 515 1.5%
8 han 506 1.47%
9 af 446 1.3%
10 till 415 1.21%
11 för 353 1.03%
12 icke 322 0.94%
13 291 0.85%
14 sig 291 0.85%
15 med 273 0.79%
16 jag 262 0.76%
17 Gogol 242 0.7%
18 honom 228 0.66%
19 de 201 0.58%
20 om 200 0.58%
21 ett 192 0.56%
22 hans 179 0.52%
23 167 0.49%
24 var 163 0.47%
25 utan 159 0.46%
26 mig 158 0.46%
27 man 141 0.41%
28 från 139 0.4%
29 sin 135 0.39%
30 har 135 0.39%
31 detta 121 0.35%
32 själf 120 0.35%
33 denna 113 0.33%
34 skulle 112 0.33%
35 än 110 0.32%
36 alla 109 0.32%
37 allt 105 0.3%
38 inte 103 0.3%
39 hvad 102 0.3%
40 men 98 0.28%
41 endast 91 0.26%
42 ha 89 0.26%
43 eller 89 0.26%
44 något 88 0.26%
45 hela 87 0.25%
46 ej 79 0.23%
47 Tsjitsjikov 77 0.22%
48 andra 77 0.22%
49 Gogols 75 0.22%
50 74 0.21%
51 kan 71 0.21%
52 Chlestakov 66 0.19%
53 också 65 0.19%
54 skall 62 0.18%
55 vi 62 0.18%
56 dem 62 0.18%
57 där 62 0.18%
58 Gud 61 0.18%
59 sitt 59 0.17%
60 världen 58 0.17%
61 säger 58 0.17%
62 någon 58 0.17%
63 hade 57 0.17%
64 äfven 55 0.16%
65 vid 53 0.15%
66 vara 52 0.15%
67 ni 50 0.15%
68 mot 50 0.15%
69 hos 50 0.15%
70 öfver 50 0.15%
71 två 50 0.15%
72 nu 48 0.14%
73 ryska 48 0.14%
74 åt 48 0.14%
75 här 47 0.14%
76 sina 47 0.14%
77 er 45 0.13%
78 äro 45 0.13%
79 samma 44 0.13%
80 lifvet 43 0.12%
81 djäfvulen 42 0.12%
82 liksom 42 0.12%
83 oss 42 0.12%
84 genom 41 0.12%
85 mitt 41 0.12%
86 fader 41 0.12%
87 säga 40 0.12%
88 alldeles 40 0.12%
89 Puschkin 40 0.12%
90 gång 39 0.11%
91 ut 39 0.11%
92 min 38 0.11%
93 själfva 38 0.11%
94 efter 38 0.11%
95 dessa 37 0.11%
96 upp 37 0.11%
97 mest 37 0.11%
98 lif 36 0.1%
99 ord 35 0.1%
100 Ryssland 35 0.1%
101 dess 35 0.1%
102 kunde 34 0.1%
103 inom 34 0.1%
104 lefvande 34 0.1%
105 ur 33 0.1%
106 du 33 0.1%
107 annan 33 0.1%
108 lika 32 0.09%
109 blir 32 0.09%
110 ingen 32 0.09%
111 göra 32 0.09%
112 själar 32 0.09%
113 ännu 31 0.09%
114 döda 31 0.09%
115 ändå 30 0.09%
116 blef 30 0.09%
117 under 30 0.09%
118 skrifver 29 0.08%
119 ju 29 0.08%
120 mina 29 0.08%
121 själ 29 0.08%
122 såsom 29 0.08%
123 när 29 0.08%
124 sista 29 0.08%
125 måste 29 0.08%
126 eviga 29 0.08%
127 ser 28 0.08%
128 ville 28 0.08%
129 Matfej 28 0.08%
130 Petersburg 28 0.08%
131 sådan 28 0.08%
132 annat 27 0.08%
133 människa 27 0.08%
134 se 27 0.08%
135 dig 27 0.08%
136 hvilken 26 0.08%
137 kanske 26 0.08%
138 mera 25 0.07%
139 såg 25 0.07%
140 enda 25 0.07%
141 in 25 0.07%
142 människan 24 0.07%
143 finns 24 0.07%
144 ligger 24 0.07%
145 just 24 0.07%
146 kunna 24 0.07%
147 hur 24 0.07%
148 väsen 24 0.07%
149 vet 24 0.07%
150 slags 23 0.07%
151 död 23 0.07%
152 några 23 0.07%
153 aldrig 23 0.07%
154 hvarje 23 0.07%
155 kyrkan 23 0.07%
156 rätt 23 0.07%
157 Brefväxlingen 22 0.06%
158 heliga 22 0.06%
159 sedan 22 0.06%
160 Tsjitsjikovs 22 0.06%
161 bara 22 0.06%
162 bli 22 0.06%
163 egen 22 0.06%
164 helt 22 0.06%
165 vill 21 0.06%
166 ens 21 0.06%
167 ingenting 21 0.06%
168 känner 21 0.06%
169 vilja 21 0.06%
170 alltid 21 0.06%
171 gör 21 0.06%
172 vän 21 0.06%
173 sätt 20 0.06%
174 Chlestakovs 20 0.06%
175 började 20 0.06%
176 ena 20 0.06%
177 kropp 19 0.06%
178 plötsligt 19 0.06%
179 bakom 19 0.06%
180 hvar 19 0.06%
181 väl 19 0.06%
182 ty 19 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 Gogol och djäfvulen  - en studie by Dmitrij Merezjkovskij

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.