Literature analysis for language learners: På prärien. Roman by Hilma Angered-Strandberg

På prärien. Roman by Hilma Angered-Strandberg : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is På prärien. Roman for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 44,713, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated På prärien. Roman to have a difficulty score of 64. Here're its scores:

Measure Score
easy difficult (1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty 64% 64
Vocabulary Difficulty 78% 78
Grammatical Difficulty 51% 51

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

78%

Vocabulary difficulty: 78%

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

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for På prärien. Roman: a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in På prärien. Roman:

Measure Score
Measure Score
Number of words 44,713
Number of unique words 9,282
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities 2,139
Number of very rare non-entity words 2,134
Number of sentences 6,990
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 9,096 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read På prärien. Roman without a dictionary and fully understand it.

Grammatical Difficulty: Breakdown

51%

Grammatical difficulty: 51%

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) 0.207591
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR) 0.00000464274
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR) 0.00000232137
MTLD Index 66
HDD Index 65
Yule's I Index 69
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I) 67

The type-token ratio (TTR) of På prärien. Roman is 0.207591. 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 9,282, while the number of words is 44,713, so the TTR is 9,282 / 44,713 = 0.207591. 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, 9,282 / (44,713 * 44,713) = 0.00000464274), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 9,282 / 2 * (44,713 * 44,713) = 0.00000232137). 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 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 51.

Other Information about På prärien. Roman by Hilma Angered-Strandberg

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the På prärien. Roman is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

Men vi veta, att äfven världslig kunskap är en god sak — och en nyttig sak — och en tillåten sak, när den sker med gudsfruktan, och när den inhämtas inom de gränser, som Herren satt för vårt förstånd. Ty förståndet är en skön gåfva, när det brukas till Herrens ära och icke förlitar sig på sitt eget förmörkade väsen, därutur ingen sann vishet står att hämta. ---Men nu ville jag säga våra kära unga vänner, att detta är ett kristligt samhälle, och att flärd och fåfänga här icke funnit någon plats ---- Om det är någon af oss, som har mer än han behöfver af detta jordiska goda, sä ger han det så gerna till kyrkan och missionen — guld och glitter hafva vi inte bruk för, — men i Herrens vingård vilja vi alltid tjäna. ...

Top most frequently used words in På prärien. Roman by Hilma Angered-Strandberg*

Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
1 och 1,580 3.53%
2 det 792 1.77%
3 en 674 1.51%
4 hon 622 1.39%
5 att 617 1.38%
6 som 570 1.27%
7 på 505 1.13%
8 af 451 1.01%
9 med 430 0.96%
10 sig 408 0.91%
11 den 408 0.91%
12 är 406 0.91%
13 så 352 0.79%
14 till 325 0.73%
15 jag 313 0.7%
16 var 301 0.67%
17 för 295 0.66%
18 ett 291 0.65%
19 de 285 0.64%
20 Matilda 242 0.54%
21 han 235 0.53%
22 inte 233 0.52%
23 icke 232 0.52%
24 om 221 0.49%
25 du 216 0.48%
26 henne 180 0.4%
27 där 168 0.38%
28 hennes 168 0.38%
29 hade 165 0.37%
30 öfver 161 0.36%
31 ut 158 0.35%
32 sin 157 0.35%
33 upp 152 0.34%
34 men 145 0.32%
35 har 145 0.32%
36 man 141 0.32%
37 något 129 0.29%
38 från 116 0.26%
39 Erik 116 0.26%
40 in 114 0.25%
41 här 111 0.25%
42 nu 108 0.24%
43 då 106 0.24%
44 vi 106 0.24%
45 allt 106 0.24%
46 alla 105 0.23%
47 vid 103 0.23%
48 fram 103 0.23%
49 sina 100 0.22%
50 hvad 99 0.22%
51 Ada 98 0.22%
52 fru 90 0.2%
53 sade 89 0.2%
54 efter 85 0.19%
55 kom 84 0.19%
56 mig 83 0.19%
57 kunde 82 0.18%
58 denna 82 0.18%
59 hans 82 0.18%
60 Linde 79 0.18%
61 ju 78 0.17%
62 skulle 78 0.17%
63 ni 78 0.17%
64 sitt 77 0.17%
65 kan 77 0.17%
66 mot 76 0.17%
67 Hjelm 75 0.17%
68 hela 72 0.16%
69 detta 72 0.16%
70 såg 70 0.16%
71 hur 69 0.15%
72 litet 68 0.15%
73 än 68 0.15%
74 ned 67 0.15%
75 när 67 0.15%
76 gick 66 0.15%
77 gå 66 0.15%
78 eller 64 0.14%
79 utan 64 0.14%
80 aldrig 63 0.14%
81 väl 63 0.14%
82 dig 62 0.14%
83 ögon 61 0.14%
84 genom 61 0.14%
85 stora 60 0.13%
86 bara 60 0.13%
87 dem 59 0.13%
88 Pryhl 58 0.13%
89 se 57 0.13%
90 Gud 56 0.13%
91 ord 56 0.13%
92 vara 54 0.12%
93 honom 54 0.12%
94 stod 54 0.12%
95 går 53 0.12%
96 vet 52 0.12%
97 skall 51 0.11%
98 vill 51 0.11%
99 Ja 51 0.11%
100 själf 50 0.11%
101 lilla 50 0.11%
102 dessa 49 0.11%
103 ville 49 0.11%
104 säga 49 0.11%
105 blef 48 0.11%
106 voro 46 0.1%
107 ser 46 0.1%
108 varit 45 0.1%
109 Gustafsson 45 0.1%
110 hand 45 0.1%
111 tog 43 0.1%
112 mer 43 0.1%
113 dag 43 0.1%
114 steg 42 0.09%
115 sedan 41 0.09%
116 under 41 0.09%
117 små 41 0.09%
118 ha 41 0.09%
119 åt 40 0.09%
120 nog 39 0.09%
121 Ellida 39 0.09%
122 själ 38 0.08%
123 kommer 38 0.08%
124 kände 37 0.08%
125 ingen 37 0.08%
126 mycket 37 0.08%
127 ögonen 37 0.08%
128 oss 37 0.08%
129 min 37 0.08%
130 bort 37 0.08%
131 blir 36 0.08%
132 nästan 36 0.08%
133 göra 36 0.08%
134 omkring 36 0.08%
135 barn 35 0.08%
136 få 35 0.08%
137 världen 35 0.08%
138 blott 35 0.08%
139 stilla 34 0.08%
140 stor 34 0.08%
141 ansikte 34 0.08%
142 Matildas 34 0.08%
143 ej 33 0.07%
144 måste 33 0.07%
145 ingenting 33 0.07%
146 åter 33 0.07%
147 talade 33 0.07%
148 några 32 0.07%
149 frun 32 0.07%
150 andra 32 0.07%
151 låg 32 0.07%
152 tankar 32 0.07%
153 händer 31 0.07%
154 började 31 0.07%
155 plötsligt 31 0.07%
156 folk 30 0.07%
157 Mattis 30 0.07%
158 annat 30 0.07%
159 många 30 0.07%
160 ur 30 0.07%
161 gång 29 0.06%
162 gjorde 29 0.06%
163 gör 29 0.06%
164 satt 29 0.06%
165 hvar 29 0.06%
166 pä 28 0.06%
167 alltid 28 0.06%
168 ljus 28 0.06%
169 lika 28 0.06%
170 gamla 27 0.06%
171 också 27 0.06%
172 all 27 0.06%
173 lif 27 0.06%
174 er 27 0.06%
175 någon 26 0.06%
176 fick 26 0.06%
177 stort 26 0.06%
178 långsamt 26 0.06%
179 samma 26 0.06%
180 komma 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 På prärien. Roman by Hilma Angered-Strandberg

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.