Literature analysis for language learners: Högre uppgifter. Berättelse by Tor Hedberg

Högre uppgifter. Berättelse by Tor Hedberg : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Högre uppgifter. Berättelse for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 44,056, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Högre uppgifter. Berättelse to have a difficulty score of 60. Here're its scores:

Measure Score
easy difficult (1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty 60% 60
Vocabulary Difficulty 73% 73
Grammatical Difficulty 47% 47

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

73%

Vocabulary difficulty: 73%

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

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for Högre uppgifter. Berättelse: a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Högre uppgifter. Berättelse:

Measure Score
Measure Score
Number of words 44,056
Number of unique words 7,502
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities 1,466
Number of very rare non-entity words 2,146
Number of sentences 6,824
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 7,351 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Högre uppgifter. Berättelse without a dictionary and fully understand it.

Grammatical Difficulty: Breakdown

47%

Grammatical difficulty: 47%

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) 0.170283
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR) 0.00000386516
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR) 0.00000193258
MTLD Index 54
HDD Index 61
Yule's I Index 65
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I) 60

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Högre uppgifter. Berättelse is 0.170283. 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 7,502, while the number of words is 44,056, so the TTR is 7,502 / 44,056 = 0.170283. 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, 7,502 / (44,056 * 44,056) = 0.00000386516), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 7,502 / 2 * (44,056 * 44,056) = 0.00000193258). 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 60 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 47.

Other Information about Högre uppgifter. Berättelse by Tor Hedberg

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Högre uppgifter. Berättelse is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

Brunner stannade som förstenad på tröskeln, stirrande på henne, som om han icke ville tro sina ögons vittnesbörd. Slutligen fick han fram: »Röker dur» Hon svarade med ansträngd likgiltighet: »Ja, — som du ser.» Han gick ett slag öfver golfvet, sökande efter ord för att ge sin förbittring luft. Hon satt afvaktande och följde honom med ögonen.Sä stannade han midt framför henne och frågade med en röst, som han knapt förmådde beherska: »Ämnar du kanske taga detta till en vana hädanefter ?» »Och om så vore?» ...

Top most frequently used words in Högre uppgifter. Berättelse by Tor Hedberg*

Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
1 och 1,497 3.4%
2 en 846 1.92%
3 att 834 1.89%
4 som 828 1.88%
5 hon 780 1.77%
6 sig 750 1.7%
7 han 685 1.55%
8 det 682 1.55%
9 på 618 1.4%
10 af 497 1.13%
11 med 488 1.11%
12 för 471 1.07%
13 var 461 1.05%
14 den 419 0.95%
15 ett 393 0.89%
16 henne 381 0.86%
17 hade 377 0.86%
18 till 312 0.71%
19 om 303 0.69%
20 honom 301 0.68%
21 icke 293 0.67%
22 så 293 0.67%
23 sin 282 0.64%
24 jag 241 0.55%
25 då 231 0.52%
26 hennes 217 0.49%
27 de 209 0.47%
28 men 194 0.44%
29 Signe 189 0.43%
30 hans 167 0.38%
31 skulle 167 0.38%
32 allt 151 0.34%
33 inte 149 0.34%
34 upp 149 0.34%
35 öfver 142 0.32%
36 sitt 139 0.32%
37 sina 136 0.31%
38 gick 135 0.31%
39 är 133 0.3%
40 du 129 0.29%
41 kom 124 0.28%
42 från 123 0.28%
43 såg 122 0.28%
44 sjelf 117 0.27%
45 nu 114 0.26%
46 hela 113 0.26%
47 vid 112 0.25%
48 in 111 0.25%
49 dem 110 0.25%
50 man 110 0.25%
51 ut 109 0.25%
52 under 108 0.25%
53 detta 107 0.24%
54 utan 106 0.24%
55 der 103 0.23%
56 alla 99 0.22%
57 denna 99 0.22%
58 efter 97 0.22%
59 något 90 0.2%
60 åter 87 0.2%
61 mig 83 0.19%
62 lif 81 0.18%
63 har 80 0.18%
64 kunde 80 0.18%
65 ner 76 0.17%
66 endast 76 0.17%
67 Brunner 72 0.16%
68 än 71 0.16%
69 blef 70 0.16%
70 hvad 70 0.16%
71 mot 70 0.16%
72 ord 69 0.16%
73 fram 68 0.15%
74 mycket 67 0.15%
75 kände 67 0.15%
76 aldrig 67 0.15%
77 stod 65 0.15%
78 vara 65 0.15%
79 bort 64 0.15%
80 varit 63 0.14%
81 tid 58 0.13%
82 gå 57 0.13%
83 gång 57 0.13%
84 Volmer 57 0.13%
85 tankar 56 0.13%
86 dock 56 0.13%
87 började 56 0.13%
88 fick 55 0.12%
89 åt 54 0.12%
90 hur 53 0.12%
91 Erik 53 0.12%
92 satt 52 0.12%
93 ur 52 0.12%
94 dessa 50 0.11%
95 någon 49 0.11%
96 låg 48 0.11%
97 skall 48 0.11%
98 se 47 0.11%
99 samma 47 0.11%
100 alldeles 47 0.11%
101 blifvit 46 0.1%
102 också 46 0.1%
103 tog 46 0.1%
104 blick 46 0.1%
105 genom 46 0.1%
106 kommit 45 0.1%
107 mera 45 0.1%
108 sade 45 0.1%
109 ännu 44 0.1%
110 stund 44 0.1%
111 hafva 44 0.1%
112 andra 43 0.1%
113 steg 43 0.1%
114 ögon 41 0.09%
115 måste 41 0.09%
116 barn 41 0.09%
117 gjorde 39 0.09%
118 röst 39 0.09%
119 ville 39 0.09%
120 eller 38 0.09%
121 nästan 38 0.09%
122 kropp 38 0.09%
123 mer 38 0.09%
124 svarade 37 0.08%
125 vet 37 0.08%
126 intet 37 0.08%
127 första 36 0.08%
128 lifvet 36 0.08%
129 såsom 36 0.08%
130 omkring 36 0.08%
131 Gud 36 0.08%
132 väl 36 0.08%
133 slutligen 36 0.08%
134 taga 36 0.08%
135 alltid 35 0.08%
136 ifrån 35 0.08%
137 framför 35 0.08%
138 ju 35 0.08%
139 göra 34 0.08%
140 hos 34 0.08%
141 känsla 34 0.08%
142 bara 34 0.08%
143 voro 34 0.08%
144 kan 34 0.08%
145 satte 34 0.08%
146 komma 33 0.07%
147 ansigte 33 0.07%
148 länge 33 0.07%
149 få 32 0.07%
150 snart 31 0.07%
151 dig 31 0.07%
152 vill 30 0.07%
153 dag 30 0.07%
154 redan 30 0.07%
155 mellan 29 0.07%
156 liksom 29 0.07%
157 hörde 29 0.07%
158 reste 29 0.07%
159 här 29 0.07%
160 säga 29 0.07%
161 ty 29 0.07%
162 tro 29 0.07%
163 drog 29 0.07%
164 min 29 0.07%
165 frågade 29 0.07%
166 småningom 28 0.06%
167 längre 28 0.06%
168 rummet 28 0.06%
169 annat 28 0.06%
170 äfven 28 0.06%
171 tyst 28 0.06%
172 blickar 28 0.06%
173 stora 28 0.06%
174 någonting 28 0.06%
175 stannade 27 0.06%
176 hand 27 0.06%
177 år 27 0.06%
178 dörren 27 0.06%
179 tror 26 0.06%
180 förut 26 0.06%
181 dess 26 0.06%
182 fast 26 0.06%
183 gått 26 0.06%
184 tänka 26 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 Högre uppgifter. Berättelse by Tor Hedberg

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.