Hedningen och andra berättelser från Söderhafsöarna by Jack London : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Hedningen och andra berättelser från Söderhafsöarna for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 49,296, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Hedningen och andra berättelser från Söderhafsöarna to have a difficulty score of 53. Here're its scores:

Measure Score
easy difficult (1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty 53% 53
Vocabulary Difficulty 58% 58
Grammatical Difficulty 48% 48

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

58%

Vocabulary difficulty: 58%

This score has been calculated based on frequency vocabulary (the top most frequently used words in Swedish). It combines various measures of Hedningen och andra berättelser från Söderhafsöarna'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 Hedningen och andra berättelser från Söderhafsöarna:

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for Hedningen och andra berättelser från Söderhafsöarna: a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Hedningen och andra berättelser från Söderhafsöarna:

Measure Score
Measure Score
Number of words 49,296
Number of unique words 7,895
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities 2,085
Number of very rare non-entity words 1,131
Number of sentences 8,347
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 7,737 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Hedningen och andra berättelser från Söderhafsöarna without a dictionary and fully understand it.

Grammatical Difficulty: Breakdown

48%

Grammatical difficulty: 48%

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 3
Coleman-Liau Index 6
Type/Token Ratio (TTR) 0.160155
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR) 0.00000324884
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR) 0.00000162442
MTLD Index 60
HDD Index 65
Yule's I Index 72
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I) 66

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Hedningen och andra berättelser från Söderhafsöarna is 0.160155. 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 7,895, while the number of words is 49,296, so the TTR is 7,895 / 49,296 = 0.160155. 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, 7,895 / (49,296 * 49,296) = 0.00000324884), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 7,895 / 2 * (49,296 * 49,296) = 0.00000162442). 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 3, making it understandable for 3-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 48.

Other Information about Hedningen och andra berättelser från Söderhafsöarna by Jack London

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Hedningen och andra berättelser från Söderhafsöarna is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

Harriwell tog hans puls och temperatur och sade, att när allt kom omkring var kanske omeletten ändå inte förgiftad. Brown och Mc Tavish betvivlade det också, men Bertie märkte allt för väl att de endast försökte trösta honom. Han satt och kände sig på pulsen under bordet. Det fanns intet tvivel om att den ökades och han tänkte inte alls på att det kunde vara av allt gin han druckit. Med geväret i handen gick Mc Tavish ut på verandan för att rekognoscera. »De hålla på att samla sig uppe vid köket», lydde hans rapport. »Och de tyckas ha fullt upp med Sniders. ...

Top most frequently used words in Hedningen och andra berättelser från Söderhafsöarna by Jack London*

Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
1 och 1,747 3.54%
2 att 950 1.93%
3 en 902 1.83%
4 781 1.58%
5 han 772 1.57%
6 som 685 1.39%
7 det 671 1.36%
8 var 626 1.27%
9 den 539 1.09%
10 av 524 1.06%
11 med 505 1.02%
12 till 484 0.98%
13 inte 425 0.86%
14 de 416 0.84%
15 jag 411 0.83%
16 för 406 0.82%
17 sig 378 0.77%
18 hade 314 0.64%
19 ett 305 0.62%
20 om 291 0.59%
21 är 260 0.53%
22 honom 251 0.51%
23 246 0.5%
24 vi 197 0.4%
25 mig 196 0.4%
26 Men 188 0.38%
27 hans 187 0.38%
28 från 180 0.37%
29 sade 178 0.36%
30 upp 173 0.35%
31 över 173 0.35%
32 sin 170 0.34%
33 dem 169 0.34%
34 skulle 159 0.32%
35 där 153 0.31%
36 Mc 141 0.29%
37 kunde 139 0.28%
38 ut 139 0.28%
39 man 135 0.27%
40 voro 131 0.27%
41 ni 130 0.26%
42 när 129 0.26%
43 hon 128 0.26%
44 ha 116 0.24%
45 kom 113 0.23%
46 under 112 0.23%
47 kapten 111 0.23%
48 vid 108 0.22%
49 nu 106 0.22%
50 har 103 0.21%
51 än 102 0.21%
52 såg 100 0.2%
53 tre 97 0.2%
54 fick 96 0.19%
55 eller 96 0.19%
56 Coy 96 0.19%
57 alla 96 0.19%
58 in 93 0.19%
59 efter 92 0.19%
60 vara 92 0.19%
61 mot 90 0.18%
62 oss 87 0.18%
63 också 85 0.17%
64 sina 82 0.17%
65 blev 81 0.16%
66 började 80 0.16%
67 två 80 0.16%
68 vad 79 0.16%
69 kan 79 0.16%
70 78 0.16%
71 andra 76 0.15%
72 måste 75 0.15%
73 gjorde 73 0.15%
74 73 0.15%
75 göra 69 0.14%
76 här 69 0.14%
77 68 0.14%
78 gick 68 0.14%
79 hur 67 0.14%
80 komma 67 0.14%
81 aldrig 67 0.14%
82 ur 67 0.14%
83 mycket 67 0.14%
84 ned 66 0.13%
85 tillbaka 66 0.13%
86 alldeles 65 0.13%
87 land 65 0.13%
88 vita 63 0.13%
89 Mauki 62 0.13%
90 gång 62 0.13%
91 sedan 61 0.12%
92 år 60 0.12%
93 hela 60 0.12%
94 sitt 60 0.12%
95 endast 59 0.12%
96 någon 59 0.12%
97 Davenport 59 0.12%
98 Bertie 59 0.12%
99 genom 58 0.12%
100 åt 57 0.12%
101 bort 55 0.11%
102 varit 55 0.11%
103 se 55 0.11%
104 allt 55 0.11%
105 fanns 54 0.11%
106 styrmannen 53 0.11%
107 låg 53 0.11%
108 äro 53 0.11%
109 höll 53 0.11%
110 tog 52 0.11%
111 skall 52 0.11%
112 män 51 0.1%
113 detta 51 0.1%
114 lagunen 51 0.1%
115 bara 50 0.1%
116 er 49 0.1%
117 fram 49 0.1%
118 stod 49 0.1%
119 igen 49 0.1%
120 omkring 48 0.1%
121 ingen 48 0.1%
122 någonting 48 0.1%
123 Otoo 48 0.1%
124 kaptenen 48 0.1%
125 många 47 0.1%
126 bli 46 0.09%
127 henne 45 0.09%
128 mil 45 0.09%
129 Mapuhi 45 0.09%
130 visste 44 0.09%
131 ännu 44 0.09%
132 något 44 0.09%
133 första 43 0.09%
134 min 43 0.09%
135 ombord 43 0.09%
136 mer 43 0.09%
137 Ja 42 0.09%
138 utan 41 0.08%
139 mr 41 0.08%
140 hundra 41 0.08%
141 Bunster 40 0.08%
142 fast 40 0.08%
143 några 40 0.08%
144 mannen 40 0.08%
145 nog 39 0.08%
146 frågade 39 0.08%
147 väg 38 0.08%
148 alltid 38 0.08%
149 kommer 38 0.08%
150 längre 38 0.08%
151 Pyrenees 38 0.08%
152 kunna 38 0.08%
153 denna 37 0.08%
154 ty 37 0.08%
155 vattnet 37 0.08%
156 icke 37 0.08%
157 just 37 0.08%
158 tusen 36 0.07%
159 skonaren 35 0.07%
160 ner 35 0.07%
161 deras 34 0.07%
162 sex 34 0.07%
163 enda 34 0.07%
164 blivit 34 0.07%
165 Starhurst 34 0.07%
166 samma 34 0.07%
167 kommit 34 0.07%
168 vit 33 0.07%
169 ta 33 0.07%
170 besättningen 33 0.07%
171 själv 32 0.06%
172 tio 32 0.06%
173 våra 32 0.06%
174 ändå 32 0.06%
175 Raoul 32 0.06%
176 dag 32 0.06%
177 fått 32 0.06%
178 ögonblick 32 0.06%
179 vatten 31 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 Hedningen och andra berättelser från Söderhafsöarna by Jack London

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.