Människor och böcker. Studier och kritiker by Johan Mortensen : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Människor och böcker. Studier och kritiker for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 56,700, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

Read the Full Text Now for Free!

Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Människor och böcker. Studier och kritiker to have a difficulty score of 68. Here're its scores:

Measure Score
easy difficult (1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty 68% 68
Vocabulary Difficulty 79% 79
Grammatical Difficulty 58% 58

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

79%

Vocabulary difficulty: 79%

This score has been calculated based on frequency vocabulary (the top most frequently used words in Swedish). It combines various measures of Människor och böcker. Studier och kritiker'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 Människor och böcker. Studier och kritiker:

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for Människor och böcker. Studier och kritiker: a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Människor och böcker. Studier och kritiker:

Measure Score
Measure Score
Number of words 56,700
Number of unique words 13,322
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities 2,219
Number of very rare non-entity words 2,577
Number of sentences 9,247
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 13,055 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Människor och böcker. Studier och kritiker without a dictionary and fully understand it.

Grammatical Difficulty: Breakdown

58%

Grammatical difficulty: 58%

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 6
Coleman-Liau Index 10
Type/Token Ratio (TTR) 0.234956
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR) 0.00000414384
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR) 0.00000207192
MTLD Index 71
HDD Index 66
Yule's I Index 75
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I) 71

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Människor och böcker. Studier och kritiker is 0.234956. 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 13,322, while the number of words is 56,700, so the TTR is 13,322 / 56,700 = 0.234956. 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, 13,322 / (56,700 * 56,700) = 0.00000414384), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 13,322 / 2 * (56,700 * 56,700) = 0.00000207192). 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 6, making it understandable for 6-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 71 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 58.

Other Information about Människor och böcker. Studier och kritiker by Johan Mortensen

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Människor och böcker. Studier och kritiker is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

Publiken drömmer sig för ett ögonblick bort från det ofta hårda vardagslivet, och redan denna omständighet är tillräcklig för att förklara dessa böckers framgång. Alla hava vi i fjorton-, femtonårsåldern med förtjusning slukat dylika romaner! Det är redan antytt, att kritiken visade sig mindre entusiastisk än publiken. Runt ikring började en kraftigare verklighetskonst att spira upp. Dumas fils behärskade scenen. Flaubert och Goncourtarne ut-gåvo visserligen starkt diskuterade, men banbrytande arbeten; Mérimée hade i sina fint ciselerade berättelser redan länge infört ett starkare verklighetselement. ...

Top most frequently used words in Människor och böcker. Studier och kritiker by Johan Mortensen*

Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
1 och 1,862 3.28%
2 en 1,133 2%
3 som 1,093 1.93%
4 att 966 1.7%
5 av 923 1.63%
6 är 874 1.54%
7 han 703 1.24%
8 den 699 1.23%
9 det 664 1.17%
10 för 541 0.95%
11 med 511 0.9%
12 de 508 0.9%
13 497 0.88%
14 sig 482 0.85%
15 till 466 0.82%
16 icke 438 0.77%
17 ett 425 0.75%
18 hans 358 0.63%
19 om 301 0.53%
20 man 300 0.53%
21 sin 269 0.47%
22 honom 260 0.46%
23 har 256 0.45%
24 233 0.41%
25 denna 225 0.4%
26 men 218 0.38%
27 var 216 0.38%
28 jag 171 0.3%
29 dessa 167 0.29%
30 sina 166 0.29%
31 under 164 0.29%
32 från 163 0.29%
33 detta 148 0.26%
34 143 0.25%
35 vid 133 0.23%
36 också 126 0.22%
37 äro 126 0.22%
38 eller 125 0.22%
39 endast 125 0.22%
40 där 124 0.22%
41 sitt 122 0.22%
42 hade 121 0.21%
43 över 117 0.21%
44 alla 116 0.2%
45 hon 113 0.2%
46 själv 109 0.19%
47 allt 107 0.19%
48 vilken 106 0.19%
49 än 102 0.18%
50 utan 100 0.18%
51 Huysmans 97 0.17%
52 efter 97 0.17%
53 andra 95 0.17%
54 mig 95 0.17%
55 mot 94 0.17%
56 skulle 90 0.16%
57 liv 89 0.16%
58 kan 88 0.16%
59 dem 88 0.16%
60 mycket 86 0.15%
61 hela 80 0.14%
62 Hamlet 78 0.14%
63 ännu 76 0.13%
64 varit 73 0.13%
65 genom 73 0.13%
66 något 68 0.12%
67 in 68 0.12%
68 upp 68 0.12%
69 henne 67 0.12%
70 ej 62 0.11%
71 hennes 62 0.11%
72 även 61 0.11%
73 alltid 61 0.11%
74 vi 60 0.11%
75 vilka 60 0.11%
76 finnes 60 0.11%
77 vad 59 0.1%
78 sätt 58 0.1%
79 sedan 57 0.1%
80 deras 57 0.1%
81 samma 57 0.1%
82 vara 56 0.1%
83 åt 56 0.1%
84 annan 56 0.1%
85 hava 55 0.1%
86 ut 55 0.1%
87 första 54 0.1%
88 nästan 54 0.1%
89 stora 53 0.09%
90 helt 53 0.09%
91 aldrig 51 0.09%
92 år 50 0.09%
93 ögonblick 50 0.09%
94 ur 48 0.08%
95 många 48 0.08%
96 mellan 48 0.08%
97 dess 48 0.08%
98 oss 48 0.08%
99 annat 48 0.08%
100 när 48 0.08%
101 redan 48 0.08%
102 måste 47 0.08%
103 kunna 46 0.08%
104 fram 46 0.08%
105 här 46 0.08%
106 gamla 45 0.08%
107 nu 44 0.08%
108 blir 43 0.08%
109 huru 42 0.07%
110 kunde 42 0.07%
111 vars 41 0.07%
112 står 41 0.07%
113 skall 41 0.07%
114 Shakespeare 41 0.07%
115 mera 40 0.07%
116 liksom 40 0.07%
117 några 39 0.07%
118 dock 39 0.07%
119 ofta 39 0.07%
120 tillbaka 39 0.07%
121 sista 38 0.07%
122 gör 38 0.07%
123 ingen 38 0.07%
124 gång 37 0.07%
125 fast 37 0.07%
126 först 36 0.06%
127 långt 36 0.06%
128 går 36 0.06%
129 se 36 0.06%
130 någon 36 0.06%
131 nya 36 0.06%
132 äkta 35 0.06%
133 olika 35 0.06%
134 mest 35 0.06%
135 åter 35 0.06%
136 kommer 35 0.06%
137 arbete 35 0.06%
138 nog 35 0.06%
139 väl 35 0.06%
140 senare 34 0.06%
141 själva 34 0.06%
142 Tintomara 34 0.06%
143 ord 34 0.06%
144 såsom 34 0.06%
145 göra 34 0.06%
146 egen 34 0.06%
147 finner 33 0.06%
148 får 33 0.06%
149 slutligen 33 0.06%
150 all 33 0.06%
151 Benvenuto 33 0.06%
152 kanske 33 0.06%
153 hos 32 0.06%
154 dag 32 0.06%
155 framför 32 0.06%
156 the 32 0.06%
157 Cellini 32 0.06%
158 intet 31 0.05%
159 därför 31 0.05%
160 of 30 0.05%
161 livet 30 0.05%
162 mitt 29 0.05%
163 ser 29 0.05%
164 29 0.05%
165 franska 29 0.05%
166 vill 29 0.05%
167 min 29 0.05%
168 just 29 0.05%
169 voro 29 0.05%
170 större 29 0.05%
171 längre 28 0.05%
172 blott 28 0.05%
173 författaren 28 0.05%
174 Des 28 0.05%
175 tidens 28 0.05%
176 såg 28 0.05%
177 emellertid 28 0.05%
178 yttre 27 0.05%
179 dagar 27 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 Människor och böcker. Studier och kritiker by Johan Mortensen

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.