Tattare. Några historier från Halland by John Wigforss : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Tattare. Några historier från Halland for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 17,620, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Tattare. Några historier från Halland to have a difficulty score of 69. Here're its scores:

Measure Score
easy difficult (1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty 69% 69
Vocabulary Difficulty 85% 85
Grammatical Difficulty 53% 53

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

85%

Vocabulary difficulty: 85%

This score has been calculated based on frequency vocabulary (the top most frequently used words in Swedish). It combines various measures of Tattare. Några historier från Halland'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 Tattare. Några historier från Halland:

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for Tattare. Några historier från Halland: a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Tattare. Några historier från Halland:

Measure Score
Measure Score
Number of words 17,620
Number of unique words 4,712
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities 982
Number of very rare non-entity words 1,050
Number of sentences 2,514
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 4,617 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Tattare. Några historier från Halland without a dictionary and fully understand it.

Grammatical Difficulty: Breakdown

53%

Grammatical difficulty: 53%

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 5
Coleman-Liau Index 8
Type/Token Ratio (TTR) 0.267423
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR) 0.0000151773
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR) 0.00000758863
MTLD Index 64
HDD Index 65
Yule's I Index 71
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I) 67

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Tattare. Några historier från Halland is 0.267423. 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 4,712, while the number of words is 17,620, so the TTR is 4,712 / 17,620 = 0.267423. 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, 4,712 / (17,620 * 17,620) = 0.0000151773), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 4,712 / 2 * (17,620 * 17,620) = 0.00000758863). 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 5, making it understandable for 5-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 53.

Other Information about Tattare. Några historier från Halland by John Wigforss

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Tattare. Några historier från Halland is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

— Hör du, sade han plötsligt,, då vi passerade en träbro öfver en liten, tillfrusen ström, här var det som två tattare dräptes anno 84. — Den der historien är farbror skyldig mig ännu, sade jag. -Jag har nog läst och l-äst om rättegångsreferaten från den saken, när den gamla sjelfhämden gick igen i förfjor, men det föreföll mig alltid som hade det egentliga, innersta motivet aldrig kommit riktigt fram.— Det kan du nog ha rätt i, menade häradsdomaren. Hur det hänger i hop med saken, vet egentligen inte mer än en, och han fins långt in i Amerika, om han inte är hängd för länge sedan. Så berättade häradsdomaren historien. Han kände den bättre än någon annan, ty han hade under årens lopp lagt faktum till faktum, upptäckt till upptäckt. Jag har här och ...

Top most frequently used words in Tattare. Några historier från Halland by John Wigforss*

Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
1 och 655 3.72%
2 en 331 1.88%
3 att 303 1.72%
4 han 292 1.66%
5 262 1.49%
6 det 234 1.33%
7 som 231 1.31%
8 var 229 1.3%
9 af 199 1.13%
10 till 194 1.1%
11 med 191 1.08%
12 den 181 1.03%
13 för 177 1%
14 sig 165 0.94%
15 hade 156 0.89%
16 ett 154 0.87%
17 jag 114 0.65%
18 113 0.64%
19 om 104 0.59%
20 hon 96 0.54%
21 du 93 0.53%
22 men 92 0.52%
23 honom 92 0.52%
24 de 90 0.51%
25 sin 87 0.49%
26 är 87 0.49%
27 inte 83 0.47%
28 65 0.37%
29 sade 64 0.36%
30 hans 64 0.36%
31 har 61 0.35%
32 icke 60 0.34%
33 från 60 0.34%
34 mig 52 0.3%
35 der 49 0.28%
36 vid 49 0.28%
37 blef 44 0.25%
38 mot 44 0.25%
39 aldrig 44 0.25%
40 ut 43 0.24%
41 Kristian 43 0.24%
42 än 42 0.24%
43 Martha 40 0.23%
44 sitt 40 0.23%
45 här 40 0.23%
46 skulle 39 0.22%
47 upp 39 0.22%
48 August 38 0.22%
49 nog 36 0.2%
50 Alexander 36 0.2%
51 kunde 36 0.2%
52 eller 35 0.2%
53 öfver 35 0.2%
54 varit 35 0.2%
55 efter 34 0.19%
56 dig 33 0.19%
57 henne 32 0.18%
58 dem 32 0.18%
59 Jakob 32 0.18%
60 ännu 31 0.18%
61 hennes 31 0.18%
62 sina 31 0.18%
63 fram 30 0.17%
64 nu 30 0.17%
65 något 29 0.16%
66 väl 29 0.16%
67 kom 29 0.16%
68 Göran 29 0.16%
69 några 27 0.15%
70 ur 27 0.15%
71 mycket 27 0.15%
72 vi 27 0.15%
73 in 26 0.15%
74 man 26 0.15%
75 sedan 26 0.15%
76 alla 26 0.15%
77 gick 26 0.15%
78 Strömsten 26 0.15%
79 ha 26 0.15%
80 Nikolaus 25 0.14%
81 25 0.14%
82 när 25 0.14%
83 år 25 0.14%
84 snart 25 0.14%
85 ej 24 0.14%
86 hela 24 0.14%
87 gjorde 24 0.14%
88 par 24 0.14%
89 far 23 0.13%
90 tattarne 22 0.12%
91 sjelf 22 0.12%
92 vara 22 0.12%
93 någon 22 0.12%
94 hvad 21 0.12%
95 komma 21 0.12%
96 Dahlstedt 21 0.12%
97 allt 21 0.12%
98 kan 20 0.11%
99 tattare 20 0.11%
100 gång 20 0.11%
101 två 20 0.11%
102 andra 20 0.11%
103 ingen 19 0.11%
104 såg 19 0.11%
105 unge 19 0.11%
106 tog 19 0.11%
107 igen 19 0.11%
108 Julianus 19 0.11%
109 fick 19 0.11%
110 min 18 0.1%
111 vill 18 0.1%
112 utan 18 0.1%
113 Solberg 18 0.1%
114 Johan 18 0.1%
115 åt 18 0.1%
116 skall 18 0.1%
117 hos 18 0.1%
118 ned 18 0.1%
119 Sone 18 0.1%
120 Folkardus 17 0.1%
121 Adelina 17 0.1%
122 liten 17 0.1%
123 gubben 17 0.1%
124 ty 17 0.1%
125 under 17 0.1%
126 bli 17 0.1%
127 fått 16 0.09%
128 ville 16 0.09%
129 satt 16 0.09%
130 mer 16 0.09%
131 fast 16 0.09%
132 se 16 0.09%
133 frågade 16 0.09%
134 Martin 15 0.09%
135 började 15 0.09%
136 detta 15 0.09%
137 båda 15 0.09%
138 Ferdinand 15 0.09%
139 gamle 15 0.09%
140 äro 15 0.09%
141 alldeles 15 0.09%
142 Elisabeth 15 0.09%
143 flickan 15 0.09%
144 också 15 0.09%
145 stod 14 0.08%
146 lif 14 0.08%
147 ögonblick 14 0.08%
148 ögon 14 0.08%
149 höll 14 0.08%
150 häradsdomaren 14 0.08%
151 bland 14 0.08%
152 många 14 0.08%
153 får 14 0.08%
154 Abraham 14 0.08%
155 låg 13 0.07%
156 Aron 13 0.07%
157 väg 13 0.07%
158 samma 13 0.07%
159 göra 13 0.07%
160 vagnen 13 0.07%
161 dag 13 0.07%
162 första 13 0.07%
163 barn 13 0.07%
164 just 13 0.07%
165 voro 13 0.07%
166 visste 13 0.07%
167 Jakobsson 12 0.07%
168 lyckades 12 0.07%
169 litet 12 0.07%
170 uppe 12 0.07%
171 Röde 12 0.07%
172 inne 12 0.07%
173 svarade 12 0.07%
174 gaf 12 0.07%
175 vet 12 0.07%
176 din 12 0.07%
177 haft 12 0.07%
178 sista 11 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 Tattare. Några historier från Halland by John Wigforss

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.