Literature analysis for language learners: Tidsbilder ur Stockholmslifvet by Claës Lundin

Tidsbilder ur Stockholmslifvet by Claës Lundin : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Tidsbilder ur Stockholmslifvet for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 54,748, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Tidsbilder ur Stockholmslifvet to have a difficulty score of 74. Here're its scores:

Measure Score
easy difficult (1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty 74% 74
Vocabulary Difficulty 89% 89
Grammatical Difficulty 60% 60

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

89%

Vocabulary difficulty: 89%

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

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for Tidsbilder ur Stockholmslifvet: a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Tidsbilder ur Stockholmslifvet:

Measure Score
Measure Score
Number of words 54,748
Number of unique words 11,535
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities 3,220
Number of very rare non-entity words 4,058
Number of sentences 9,055
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 11,304 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Tidsbilder ur Stockholmslifvet without a dictionary and fully understand it.

Grammatical Difficulty: Breakdown

60%

Grammatical difficulty: 60%

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 6
Coleman-Liau Index 9
Type/Token Ratio (TTR) 0.210693
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR) 0.00000384841
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR) 0.0000019242
MTLD Index 77
HDD Index 69
Yule's I Index 80
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I) 75

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Tidsbilder ur Stockholmslifvet is 0.210693. 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 11,535, while the number of words is 54,748, so the TTR is 11,535 / 54,748 = 0.210693. 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, 11,535 / (54,748 * 54,748) = 0.00000384841), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 11,535 / 2 * (54,748 * 54,748) = 0.0000019242). 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 6, making it understandable for 6-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 75 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 60.

Other Information about Tidsbilder ur Stockholmslifvet by Claës Lundin

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Tidsbilder ur Stockholmslifvet is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

Jonas Berg understödde Ulla och tog sig friheten att hänsyfta på skänken af de hjärtstyrkande vederkvickelsestunderna. Den gudfruktiga madamen var dock lika obeveklig ända till dess hennes herre och man infann sig i kammaren och hade med sig den unge magistern Florentinus, komministersadjunkten, hvilken förklarade, att ett så oskyldigt nöje som att se ett kungligt intåg icke borde förmenas någon. Han trodde med detta yttrande göra jungfru Ulla sig bevågen, och hon skänkte honom verkligen en tacksam blick, men därvid stannade det. Några vänliga ord kunde Scharff icke aflocka henne. Klockar Berg själf förklarade med myndig ton, att Ulla kunde gärna begifva sig till tukthusskrifvarens ...

Top most frequently used words in Tidsbilder ur Stockholmslifvet by Claës Lundin*

Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
1 och 2,006 3.66%
2 en 823 1.5%
3 på 746 1.36%
4 af 743 1.36%
5 att 703 1.28%
6 som 697 1.27%
7 var 654 1.19%
8 det 649 1.19%
9 med 631 1.15%
10 den 630 1.15%
11 till 530 0.97%
12 för 510 0.93%
13 men 476 0.87%
14 sig 453 0.83%
15 han 433 0.79%
16 de 394 0.72%
17 icke 369 0.67%
18 hade 368 0.67%
19 ett 343 0.63%
20 man 286 0.52%
21 då 276 0.5%
22 så 269 0.49%
23 jag 259 0.47%
24 är 257 0.47%
25 om 255 0.47%
26 vid 229 0.42%
27 sin 195 0.36%
28 år 194 0.35%
29 ej 193 0.35%
30 där 182 0.33%
31 mycket 164 0.3%
32 hans 152 0.28%
33 hon 147 0.27%
34 hvilken 143 0.26%
35 från 140 0.26%
36 nu 137 0.25%
37 än 132 0.24%
38 under 130 0.24%
39 något 127 0.23%
40 ännu 123 0.22%
41 har 122 0.22%
42 ha 119 0.22%
43 samt 116 0.21%
44 skulle 115 0.21%
45 sedan 112 0.2%
46 honom 111 0.2%
47 också 110 0.2%
48 vi 103 0.19%
49 hos 100 0.18%
50 någon 99 0.18%
51 ut 98 0.18%
52 eller 97 0.18%
53 kunde 96 0.18%
54 voro 94 0.17%
55 vara 93 0.17%
56 in 93 0.17%
57 mig 93 0.17%
58 äfven 92 0.17%
59 andra 88 0.16%
60 sina 88 0.16%
61 dock 87 0.16%
62 upp 85 0.16%
63 några 84 0.15%
64 inte 83 0.15%
65 henne 82 0.15%
66 åt 82 0.15%
67 sitt 81 0.15%
68 öfver 80 0.15%
69 alla 79 0.14%
70 få 79 0.14%
71 väl 78 0.14%
72 redan 76 0.14%
73 här 75 0.14%
74 hvad 75 0.14%
75 utan 74 0.14%
76 nog 73 0.13%
77 efter 72 0.13%
78 gick 72 0.13%
79 tid 72 0.13%
80 Stockholm 71 0.13%
81 många 71 0.13%
82 varit 71 0.13%
83 gamla 69 0.13%
84 dem 67 0.12%
85 oss 67 0.12%
86 allt 67 0.12%
87 aldrig 66 0.12%
88 såsom 65 0.12%
89 tiden 63 0.12%
90 kom 63 0.12%
91 förut 58 0.11%
92 se 57 0.1%
93 vardt 56 0.1%
94 sade 56 0.1%
95 fru 56 0.1%
96 stora 56 0.1%
97 par 56 0.1%
98 hvilka 56 0.1%
99 annan 55 0.1%
100 samma 54 0.1%
101 ganska 54 0.1%
102 hela 53 0.1%
103 du 53 0.1%
104 kanske 53 0.1%
105 mot 52 0.09%
106 såg 52 0.09%
107 kan 52 0.09%
108 själf 52 0.09%
109 skall 51 0.09%
110 bland 49 0.09%
111 detta 49 0.09%
112 två 49 0.09%
113 stor 49 0.09%
114 mera 49 0.09%
115 gång 48 0.09%
116 hvilket 47 0.09%
117 huset 46 0.08%
118 min 46 0.08%
119 Widstrand 46 0.08%
120 tog 45 0.08%
121 fick 45 0.08%
122 vore 45 0.08%
123 Ulla 44 0.08%
124 göra 44 0.08%
125 genom 44 0.08%
126 blott 43 0.08%
127 riktigt 43 0.08%
128 alltid 42 0.08%
129 hus 42 0.08%
130 mamsell 42 0.08%
131 teatern 42 0.08%
132 första 42 0.08%
133 alldeles 41 0.07%
134 ville 41 0.07%
135 lika 41 0.07%
136 annat 41 0.07%
137 litet 41 0.07%
138 äro 40 0.07%
139 gjorde 40 0.07%
140 talade 40 0.07%
141 nya 39 0.07%
142 vår 39 0.07%
143 stod 39 0.07%
144 hvars 38 0.07%
145 både 38 0.07%
146 förklarade 37 0.07%
147 kungliga 37 0.07%
148 just 37 0.07%
149 komma 36 0.07%
150 ingen 36 0.07%
151 fram 36 0.07%
152 ned 36 0.07%
153 endast 35 0.06%
154 bror 35 0.06%
155 fann 35 0.06%
156 därefter 35 0.06%
157 åter 35 0.06%
158 ofta 34 0.06%
159 senare 34 0.06%
160 mellan 34 0.06%
161 ty 34 0.06%
162 denna 34 0.06%
163 mindre 33 0.06%
164 mer 33 0.06%
165 liten 32 0.06%
166 gå 32 0.06%
167 unga 32 0.06%
168 ung 32 0.06%
169 fastän 32 0.06%
170 likväl 31 0.06%
171 början 31 0.06%
172 måste 31 0.06%
173 talet 30 0.05%
174 långt 30 0.05%
175 snart 30 0.05%
176 när 30 0.05%
177 gjort 30 0.05%
178 hennes 30 0.05%
179 svenska 30 0.05%
180 gaf 30 0.05%
181 tycktes 29 0.05%

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 Tidsbilder ur Stockholmslifvet by Claës Lundin

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.