Skapande liv. Studier och bekännelser by Arnold Norlind : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Skapande liv. Studier och bekännelser for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 38,217, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Skapande liv. Studier och bekännelser to have a difficulty score of 63. Here're its scores:

Measure Score
easy difficult (1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty 63% 63
Vocabulary Difficulty 75% 75
Grammatical Difficulty 51% 51

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

75%

Vocabulary difficulty: 75%

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

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for Skapande liv. Studier och bekännelser: a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Skapande liv. Studier och bekännelser:

Measure Score
Measure Score
Number of words 38,217
Number of unique words 8,580
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities 1,071
Number of very rare non-entity words 1,637
Number of sentences 6,626
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 8,408 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Skapande liv. Studier och bekännelser 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 8
Type/Token Ratio (TTR) 0.224507
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR) 0.00000587454
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR) 0.00000293727
MTLD Index 58
HDD Index 66
Yule's I Index 74
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I) 66

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Skapande liv. Studier och bekännelser is 0.224507. 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 8,580, while the number of words is 38,217, so the TTR is 8,580 / 38,217 = 0.224507. 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, 8,580 / (38,217 * 38,217) = 0.00000587454), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 8,580 / 2 * (38,217 * 38,217) = 0.00000293727). 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 66 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 Skapande liv. Studier och bekännelser by Arnold Norlind

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Skapande liv. Studier och bekännelser is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

— Jag vet inte var det kommer från — om det är från ett vattenfall bland Styx’ klyftor, eller det bara är dånet från Kaos" väldiga smedja.Kosmos k äns lan. Jag är ju inte avsedd att vara någon konstnär i inskränktaste bemärkelse, någon som producerar med andra ord. Vad som så växt ut eller överhuvud utvecklats inom mig är därför inte något produktivt, något alstrat, utan endast en ogripbar bakgrund, stämningsbakgrund, kän-slobakgrund, hur skall jag säga? Det är ju då inte underligt, att man alltid skall klaga över att allt hos en blir dimmigt och diffust. Det är ju inte avsett att vara annat. ...

Top most frequently used words in Skapande liv. Studier och bekännelser by Arnold Norlind*

Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
1 det 977 2.56%
2 och 962 2.52%
3 som 885 2.32%
4 en 679 1.78%
5 är 576 1.51%
6 att 550 1.44%
7 den 472 1.24%
8 av 417 1.09%
9 han 396 1.04%
10 var 336 0.88%
11 till 327 0.86%
12 för 326 0.85%
13 de 324 0.85%
14 ett 321 0.84%
15 315 0.82%
16 med 303 0.79%
17 sig 296 0.77%
18 inte 280 0.73%
19 270 0.71%
20 om 226 0.59%
21 man 223 0.58%
22 har 223 0.58%
23 jag 221 0.58%
24 men 171 0.45%
25 honom 169 0.44%
26 hans 160 0.42%
27 något 160 0.42%
28 hade 147 0.38%
29 ha 134 0.35%
30 från 133 0.35%
31 133 0.35%
32 vi 129 0.34%
33 kan 127 0.33%
34 eller 115 0.3%
35 sin 115 0.3%
36 där 112 0.29%
37 också 109 0.29%
38 detta 104 0.27%
39 vara 104 0.27%
40 allt 104 0.27%
41 vid 93 0.24%
42 alla 87 0.23%
43 mig 87 0.23%
44 över 85 0.22%
45 dem 84 0.22%
46 än 83 0.22%
47 skulle 82 0.21%
48 när 80 0.21%
49 måste 79 0.21%
50 kunde 76 0.2%
51 genom 74 0.19%
52 under 72 0.19%
53 nu 72 0.19%
54 efter 72 0.19%
55 sitt 69 0.18%
56 oss 68 0.18%
57 andra 68 0.18%
58 liv 67 0.18%
59 mot 67 0.18%
60 dock 65 0.17%
61 själv 64 0.17%
62 bara 63 0.16%
63 vad 62 0.16%
64 denna 62 0.16%
65 ju 59 0.15%
66 ut 58 0.15%
67 dessa 57 0.15%
68 världen 57 0.15%
69 annat 57 0.15%
70 mycket 57 0.15%
71 kommer 57 0.15%
72 väl 57 0.15%
73 utan 55 0.14%
74 ännu 55 0.14%
75 inre 54 0.14%
76 kanske 54 0.14%
77 gång 53 0.14%
78 Hölderlin 53 0.14%
79 här 53 0.14%
80 hela 51 0.13%
81 samma 51 0.13%
82 varit 51 0.13%
83 tid 51 0.13%
84 endast 51 0.13%
85 hos 50 0.13%
86 ville 49 0.13%
87 blir 49 0.13%
88 mera 49 0.13%
89 in 48 0.13%
90 se 48 0.13%
91 ändå 48 0.13%
92 några 48 0.13%
93 går 48 0.13%
94 äro 48 0.13%
95 blev 47 0.12%
96 upp 47 0.12%
97 skall 47 0.12%
98 fram 43 0.11%
99 ligger 43 0.11%
100 vill 43 0.11%
101 just 42 0.11%
102 42 0.11%
103 kunna 41 0.11%
104 ur 41 0.11%
105 hur 41 0.11%
106 Dante 41 0.11%
107 många 41 0.11%
108 komma 41 0.11%
109 ingen 41 0.11%
110 nog 41 0.11%
111 kom 40 0.1%
112 mer 40 0.1%
113 min 39 0.1%
114 någon 39 0.1%
115 helt 38 0.1%
116 inom 38 0.1%
117 dess 37 0.1%
118 även 37 0.1%
119 alltid 37 0.1%
120 sina 37 0.1%
121 stora 37 0.1%
122 mest 37 0.1%
123 ser 36 0.09%
124 första 35 0.09%
125 og 34 0.09%
126 finns 34 0.09%
127 ej 34 0.09%
128 säga 34 0.09%
129 aldrig 33 0.09%
130 du 33 0.09%
131 sådan 33 0.09%
132 liksom 32 0.08%
133 år 32 0.08%
134 ofta 32 0.08%
135 mellan 32 0.08%
136 ty 31 0.08%
137 bli 31 0.08%
138 först 31 0.08%
139 nya 31 0.08%
140 stå 30 0.08%
141 tiden 29 0.08%
142 annan 29 0.08%
143 havet 29 0.08%
144 hon 29 0.08%
145 ord 28 0.07%
146 henne 28 0.07%
147 två 28 0.07%
148 åt 28 0.07%
149 kommit 27 0.07%
150 icke 27 0.07%
151 väg 27 0.07%
152 finna 27 0.07%
153 senare 27 0.07%
154 varandra 26 0.07%
155 får 26 0.07%
156 blivit 25 0.07%
157 Obstfelder 25 0.07%
158 göra 25 0.07%
159 fått 25 0.07%
160 står 25 0.07%
161 omkring 25 0.07%
162 långt 25 0.07%
163 därför 25 0.07%
164 kring 24 0.06%
165 längtan 24 0.06%
166 vet 24 0.06%
167 känslor 24 0.06%
168 vår 24 0.06%
169 inför 24 0.06%
170 enda 24 0.06%
171 Inferno 24 0.06%
172 yttre 23 0.06%
173 själva 23 0.06%
174 kunnat 23 0.06%
175 Novalis 23 0.06%
176 mitt 23 0.06%
177 ingenting 23 0.06%
178 er 23 0.06%
179 gjort 23 0.06%
180 lika 23 0.06%
181 egen 23 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 Skapande liv. Studier och bekännelser by Arnold Norlind

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.