Porträttet. Komedi i en akt by Helena Nyblom : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Porträttet. Komedi i en akt for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 5,220, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Porträttet. Komedi i en akt to have a difficulty score of 49. Here're its scores:

Measure Score
easy difficult (1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty 49% 49
Vocabulary Difficulty 63% 63
Grammatical Difficulty 36% 36

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

63%

Vocabulary difficulty: 63%

This score has been calculated based on frequency vocabulary (the top most frequently used words in Swedish). It combines various measures of Porträttet. Komedi i en akt'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 Porträttet. Komedi i en akt:

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for Porträttet. Komedi i en akt: a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Porträttet. Komedi i en akt:

Measure Score
Measure Score
Number of words 5,220
Number of unique words 1,341
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities 357
Number of very rare non-entity words 178
Number of sentences 1,169
Average number of words/sentence 4

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 1,314 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Porträttet. Komedi i en akt without a dictionary and fully understand it.

Grammatical Difficulty: Breakdown

36%

Grammatical difficulty: 36%

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 1
Coleman-Liau Index 3
Type/Token Ratio (TTR) 0.256897
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR) 0.0000492139
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR) 0.0000246069
MTLD Index 44
HDD Index 56
Yule's I Index 59
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I) 53

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Porträttet. Komedi i en akt is 0.256897. 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 1,341, while the number of words is 5,220, so the TTR is 1,341 / 5,220 = 0.256897. 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, 1,341 / (5,220 * 5,220) = 0.0000492139), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 1,341 / 2 * (5,220 * 5,220) = 0.0000246069). 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 1, making it understandable for 1-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 53 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 36.

Other Information about Porträttet. Komedi i en akt by Helena Nyblom

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Porträttet. Komedi i en akt is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

Att Inez har rätt. — Det fattas bara så litet i att porträttet är färdigt, och när ett konstverk så där håller på att afslutas, få alla lof att visa det sin tillbörliga respekt, och ingen störa konstnären.10 PORTRÄTTET v. kuhn. Det måtte vara en märkvärdig celebritet, denne herr Keller? Inez. Det skall porträttet bäst kunna upplysa dig om. v. kuhn går till porträttet och ser därpå genom lorgnetten. Ja, det är ju charmant —charmant! Jag förstår mig nog inte så särdeles mycket på konst, ...

Top most frequently used words in Porträttet. Komedi i en akt by Helena Nyblom*

Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
1 det 122 2.34%
2 jag 101 1.93%
3 och 97 1.86%
4 att 95 1.82%
5 inte 79 1.51%
6 77 1.48%
7 en 71 1.36%
8 är 67 1.28%
9 keller 63 1.21%
10 som 59 1.13%
11 inez 58 1.11%
12 ni 56 1.07%
13 54 1.03%
14 du 49 0.94%
15 friherrinnan 46 0.88%
16 för 42 0.8%
17 till 42 0.8%
18 har 41 0.79%
19 kuhn 40 0.77%
20 Ja 37 0.71%
21 han 36 0.69%
22 var 36 0.69%
23 mig 34 0.65%
24 med 33 0.63%
25 dig 31 0.59%
26 porträttet 29 0.56%
27 ju 28 0.54%
28 Men 28 0.54%
29 28 0.54%
30 nu 28 0.54%
31 om 26 0.5%
32 er 25 0.48%
33 den 24 0.46%
34 af 24 0.46%
35 man 23 0.44%
36 där 22 0.42%
37 bara 22 0.42%
38 skulle 22 0.42%
39 ser 21 0.4%
40 kan 20 0.38%
41 Hvad 20 0.38%
42 aldrig 18 0.34%
43 ett 18 0.34%
44 går 18 0.34%
45 vet 17 0.33%
46 ha 17 0.33%
47 allt 17 0.33%
48 honom 17 0.33%
49 skall 16 0.31%
50 mycket 16 0.31%
51 vara 16 0.31%
52 ska 16 0.31%
53 sig 16 0.31%
54 vill 15 0.29%
55 min 15 0.29%
56 tant 15 0.29%
57 år 13 0.25%
58 kommer 13 0.25%
59 vi 13 0.25%
60 hade 12 0.23%
61 verkligen 12 0.23%
62 litet 12 0.23%
63 kom 12 0.23%
64 här 12 0.23%
65 själf 12 0.23%
66 henne 11 0.21%
67 dag 11 0.21%
68 hela 11 0.21%
69 de 11 0.21%
70 gång 11 0.21%
71 scenen 10 0.19%
72 Nej 10 0.19%
73 säger 10 0.19%
74 Hon 10 0.19%
75 10 0.19%
76 öfver 10 0.19%
77 färdigt 10 0.19%
78 måla 9 0.17%
79 känner 9 0.17%
80 mera 9 0.17%
81 åter 9 0.17%
82 alla 9 0.17%
83 sin 9 0.17%
84 alldeles 9 0.17%
85 väl 9 0.17%
86 din 9 0.17%
87 blir 9 0.17%
88 från 9 0.17%
89 bli 9 0.17%
90 ut 9 0.17%
91 porträtt 8 0.15%
92 öre 8 0.15%
93 upp 8 0.15%
94 mitt 8 0.15%
95 står 8 0.15%
96 när 8 0.15%
97 därefter 7 0.13%
98 barn 7 0.13%
99 fram 7 0.13%
100 fröken 7 0.13%
101 ännu 7 0.13%
102 oss 7 0.13%
103 älskar 7 0.13%
104 vilja 7 0.13%
105 andra 7 0.13%
106 herr 7 0.13%
107 ville 7 0.13%
108 höger 7 0.13%
109 genom 7 0.13%
110 hennes 7 0.13%
111 hans 7 0.13%
112 får 7 0.13%
113 nog 7 0.13%
114 se 7 0.13%
115 längre 7 0.13%
116 ögon 6 0.11%
117 nöjd 6 0.11%
118 tror 6 0.11%
119 komma 6 0.11%
120 måste 6 0.11%
121 Henry 6 0.11%
122 tycker 6 0.11%
123 haft 6 0.11%
124 börjar 6 0.11%
125 vid 6 0.11%
126 50 6 0.11%
127 handen 6 0.11%
128 säga 6 0.11%
129 något 6 0.11%
130 tre 6 0.11%
131 vackert 6 0.11%
132 varit 6 0.11%
133 också 6 0.11%
134 göra 5 0.1%
135 sina 5 0.1%
136 bakom 5 0.1%
137 emot 5 0.1%
138 hur 5 0.1%
139 fem 5 0.1%
140 fråga 5 0.1%
141 sett 5 0.1%
142 alls 5 0.1%
143 akt 5 0.1%
144 naturligtvis 5 0.1%
145 skrattar 5 0.1%
146 förstår 5 0.1%
147 sista 5 0.1%
148 dem 5 0.1%
149 staffliet 5 0.1%
150 tid 5 0.1%
151 detta 5 0.1%
152 menar 5 0.1%
153 modell 5 0.1%
154 fall 5 0.1%
155 morbror 5 0.1%
156 kunna 5 0.1%
157 god 5 0.1%
158 måhända 4 0.08%
159 fått 4 0.08%
160 hört 4 0.08%
161 förr 4 0.08%
162 nästan 4 0.08%
163 kunde 4 0.08%
164 sedan 4 0.08%
165 stanna 4 0.08%
166 Jaså 4 0.08%
167 kort 4 0.08%
168 medan 4 0.08%
169 liten 4 0.08%

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 Porträttet. Komedi i en akt by Helena Nyblom

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.