Om arbetsklassen och arbetare-föreningar by Knut Hamilton : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Om arbetsklassen och arbetare-föreningar for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 43,407, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Om arbetsklassen och arbetare-föreningar to have a difficulty score of 80. Here're its scores:

Measure Score
easy difficult (1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty 80% 80
Vocabulary Difficulty 97% 97
Grammatical Difficulty 64% 64

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

97%

Vocabulary difficulty: 97%

This score has been calculated based on frequency vocabulary (the top most frequently used words in Swedish). It combines various measures of Om arbetsklassen och arbetare-föreningar'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 Om arbetsklassen och arbetare-föreningar:

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for Om arbetsklassen och arbetare-föreningar: a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Om arbetsklassen och arbetare-föreningar:

Measure Score
Measure Score
Number of words 43,407
Number of unique words 8,154
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities 972
Number of very rare non-entity words 4,746
Number of sentences 6,288
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 7,990 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Om arbetsklassen och arbetare-föreningar without a dictionary and fully understand it.

Grammatical Difficulty: Breakdown

64%

Grammatical difficulty: 64%

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 9
Coleman-Liau Index 13
Type/Token Ratio (TTR) 0.18785
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR) 0.00000432764
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR) 0.00000216382
MTLD Index 70
HDD Index 67
Yule's I Index 76
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I) 71

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Om arbetsklassen och arbetare-föreningar is 0.18785. 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 8,154, while the number of words is 43,407, so the TTR is 8,154 / 43,407 = 0.18785. 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, 8,154 / (43,407 * 43,407) = 0.00000432764), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 8,154 / 2 * (43,407 * 43,407) = 0.00000216382). 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 9, making it understandable for 9-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 64.

Other Information about Om arbetsklassen och arbetare-föreningar by Knut Hamilton

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Om arbetsklassen och arbetare-föreningar is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

Derföre må icke heller samhället medgifva, att någon blir berättigad till arbetsersättning endast och allenast på grund deraf att han i detsamma arbetat. Han blir det endast, om han genom sitt arbete gagnat, om han gjort samhället en tjenst och i mon af storleken af denna tjenst. Dztäx produkten, som samhället behöfver, ej i och för sig arbetandet. Der-med att ”bagaren eldat sin ugn, knådat degen o. s. v. är han icke i något hänseende berättigad att ersättas af samhället eller af dess medlemmar; endast i mon han lem-nar dem bröd blir hans ansträngning af värde ocli bör ersättas mera, i den mon han lemnar mera bröd eller bättre bröd.71 Men om han i ugnen bränner upp den knådade degen eller på annat sätt åstadkommer ett dåligt arbetsresultat, har han lika litet rätt till ersättning för sitt ...

Top most frequently used words in Om arbetsklassen och arbetare-föreningar by Knut Hamilton*

Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
1 och 1,238 2.85%
2 af 1,116 2.57%
3 att 873 2.01%
4 för 645 1.49%
5 som 616 1.42%
6 de 594 1.37%
7 till 586 1.35%
8 en 532 1.23%
9 den 523 1.2%
10 det 479 1.1%
11 393 0.91%
12 är 374 0.86%
13 icke 356 0.82%
14 med 334 0.77%
15 sig 308 0.71%
16 296 0.68%
17 ett 259 0.6%
18 om 250 0.58%
19 genom 233 0.54%
20 kunna 231 0.53%
21 måste 209 0.48%
22 eller 198 0.46%
23 kan 195 0.45%
24 än 186 0.43%
25 äfven 184 0.42%
26 detta 170 0.39%
27 andra 163 0.38%
28 mera 161 0.37%
29 deras 151 0.35%
30 dessa 147 0.34%
31 alla 139 0.32%
32 vara 131 0.3%
33 äro 126 0.29%
34 hos 123 0.28%
35 denna 120 0.28%
36 ej 118 0.27%
37 föreningar 114 0.26%
38 arbetare 114 0.26%
39 dem 113 0.26%
40 skall 111 0.26%
41 utan 109 0.25%
42 någon 105 0.24%
43 sin 100 0.23%
44 man 100 0.23%
45 har 100 0.23%
46 också 99 0.23%
47 skulle 95 0.22%
48 blifva 93 0.21%
49 såsom 91 0.21%
50 utveckling 89 0.21%
51 Men 89 0.21%
52 endast 88 0.2%
53 samt 88 0.2%
54 sådan 85 0.2%
55 dess 83 0.19%
56 der 81 0.19%
57 han 80 0.18%
58 allt 80 0.18%
59 blifvit 80 0.18%
60 vid 79 0.18%
61 under 79 0.18%
62 sådane 78 0.18%
63 samma 77 0.18%
64 större 76 0.18%
65 stora 74 0.17%
66 något 73 0.17%
67 ställning 73 0.17%
68 mindre 72 0.17%
69 högre 71 0.16%
70 emellan 70 0.16%
71 likväl 69 0.16%
72 ifrån 68 0.16%
73 arbete 67 0.15%
74 blir 65 0.15%
75 hafva 65 0.15%
76 arbetarne 65 0.15%
77 kapital 63 0.15%
78 lika 62 0.14%
79 göra 62 0.14%
80 derföre 61 0.14%
81 emot 61 0.14%
82 mycket 61 0.14%
83 hans 60 0.14%
84 sjelfva 60 0.14%
85 verksamhet 59 0.14%
86 väl 59 0.14%
87 sina 59 0.14%
88 sålunda 59 0.14%
89 nya 58 0.13%
90 58 0.13%
91 hvilka 57 0.13%
92 staten 56 0.13%
93 sätt 56 0.13%
94 nu 55 0.13%
95 hvarje 53 0.12%
96 torde 53 0.12%
97 skola 52 0.12%
98 från 51 0.12%
99 sjelf 51 0.12%
100 antal 51 0.12%
101 fall 50 0.12%
102 efter 50 0.12%
103 sitt 49 0.11%
104 kunde 49 0.11%
105 arbetsklassen 48 0.11%
106 slags 48 0.11%
107 hela 48 0.11%
108 sådant 47 0.11%
109 allmänna 47 0.11%
110 vore 47 0.11%
111 inom 47 0.11%
112 47 0.11%
113 bättre 46 0.11%
114 mon 44 0.1%
115 ju 44 0.1%
116 föreningen 44 0.1%
117 tid 43 0.1%
118 deraf 43 0.1%
119 arbetarnes 43 0.1%
120 medlemmar 42 0.1%
121 förening 42 0.1%
122 visserligen 42 0.1%
123 vissa 41 0.09%
124 just 41 0.09%
125 ock 40 0.09%
126 nämligen 40 0.09%
127 blott 40 0.09%
128 olika 39 0.09%
129 många 39 0.09%
130 dels 39 0.09%
131 alldeles 38 0.09%
132 tidens 38 0.09%
133 arbetet 38 0.09%
134 varit 38 0.09%
135 dylika 38 0.09%
136 flera 37 0.09%
137 företag 37 0.09%
138 egen 37 0.09%
139 arbetarens 36 0.08%
140 åt 36 0.08%
141 jemväl 36 0.08%
142 St 36 0.08%
143 England 35 0.08%
144 mest 35 0.08%
145 dock 35 0.08%
146 enskilda 35 0.08%
147 hvilken 35 0.08%
148 honom 35 0.08%
149 söka 35 0.08%
150 komma 34 0.08%
151 nog 34 0.08%
152 hvad 34 0.08%
153 öfver 34 0.08%
154 nutiden 33 0.08%
155 här 33 0.08%
156 ändamål 33 0.08%
157 gång 32 0.07%
158 belopp 32 0.07%
159 arbetsklassens 32 0.07%
160 tydligen 32 0.07%
161 ekonomiska 32 0.07%
162 stor 32 0.07%
163 städse 32 0.07%
164 kunnat 31 0.07%
165 arbetets 31 0.07%
166 del 31 0.07%
167 förbättring 31 0.07%
168 framgång 31 0.07%
169 förmåga 31 0.07%
170 snart 31 0.07%
171 statens 30 0.07%
172 omedelbart 30 0.07%
173 derigenom 30 0.07%
174 efterhand 29 0.07%
175 år 29 0.07%
176 kraft 29 0.07%
177 hänseende 29 0.07%
178 arbetaren 29 0.07%
179 hvar 29 0.07%
180 annat 28 0.06%
181 stort 28 0.06%
182 alltså 28 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 Om arbetsklassen och arbetare-föreningar by Knut Hamilton

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.