Två gamla Stockholmares anteckningar by Nils Selander : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Två gamla Stockholmares anteckningar for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 53,449, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Två gamla Stockholmares anteckningar to have a difficulty score of 70. Here're its scores:

Measure		Score
	easy difficult	(1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty	70%	70
Vocabulary Difficulty	80%	80
Grammatical Difficulty	60%	60

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

80%

Vocabulary difficulty: 80%

This score has been calculated based on frequency vocabulary (the top most frequently used words in Swedish). It combines various measures of Två gamla Stockholmares anteckningar'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 Två gamla Stockholmares anteckningar:

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for Två gamla Stockholmares anteckningar: a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Två gamla Stockholmares anteckningar:

Measure	Score
Measure	Score
Number of words	53,449
Number of unique words	12,493
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities	2,356
Number of very rare non-entity words	2,982
Number of sentences	8,861
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 12,243 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Två gamla Stockholmares anteckningar 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	10
Type/Token Ratio (TTR)	0.233737
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR)	0.00000437308
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR)	0.00000218654
MTLD Index	75
HDD Index	68
Yule's I Index	79
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I)	74

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Två gamla Stockholmares anteckningar is 0.233737. 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 12,493, while the number of words is 53,449, so the TTR is 12,493 / 53,449 = 0.233737. 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, 12,493 / (53,449 * 53,449) = 0.00000437308), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 12,493 / 2 * (53,449 * 53,449) = 0.00000218654). 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 74 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 Två gamla Stockholmares anteckningar by Nils Selander

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Två gamla Stockholmares anteckningar is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

Vår mor erbjöd sig då att hjälpa gumman, packade spetsarna i sin koffert och for på middagen över till Torneå. Vid bryggan möttes hon av den artige tullförvaltaren, som frågade, vad som beredde staden lyckan att få se fru professorskan. Vid vår mors svar, att hon farit över för att smuggla in ett parti spetsar, som lågo i den medförda kofferten, brast den galante tullförvaltaren i skratt och befallde ett par tullvaktmästare att genast taga kofferten och bära upp den till gästgivaregården, där vår mor uppgivit sig ämna bo. Efter några timmar infann sig gumman, spetsarna ompackades, och gumman for glad i hågen söderut. Då professor Mortimer Agardh blev riksdagsman, började för oss pojkar en gyllene tid, efter vilken följde ...

Top most frequently used words in Två gamla Stockholmares anteckningar by Nils Selander*

Position	Word	Repetitions	Part of all words
Position	Word	Repetitions	Part of all words
1	och	1,842	3.45%
2	som	970	1.81%
3	att	958	1.79%
4	en	896	1.68%
5	av	885	1.66%
6	till	693	1.3%
7	på	691	1.29%
8	den	685	1.28%
9	med	617	1.15%
10	var	601	1.12%
11	för	591	1.11%
12	de	466	0.87%
13	han	451	0.84%
14	det	447	0.84%
15	vi	336	0.63%
16	då	321	0.6%
17	ett	310	0.58%
18	sig	308	0.58%
19	vid	306	0.57%
20	om	273	0.51%
21	man	246	0.46%
22	hade	243	0.45%
23	från	234	0.44%
24	där	216	0.4%
25	så	215	0.4%
26	oss	209	0.39%
27	vår	205	0.38%
28	ej	205	0.38%
29	sin	183	0.34%
30	men	183	0.34%
31	voro	169	0.32%
32	under	158	0.3%
33	eller	153	0.29%
34	icke	152	0.28%
35	kunde	145	0.27%
36	honom	136	0.25%
37	dem	130	0.24%
38	dock	127	0.24%
39	sina	121	0.23%
40	sedan	121	0.23%
41	hans	118	0.22%
42	efter	115	0.22%
43	skulle	114	0.21%
44	fick	111	0.21%
45	än	111	0.21%
46	mycket	110	0.21%
47	upp	107	0.2%
48	sitt	106	0.2%
49	är	106	0.2%
50	kom	105	0.2%
51	jag	105	0.2%
52	hon	103	0.19%
53	del	103	0.19%
54	gamla	102	0.19%
55	utan	99	0.19%
56	nu	96	0.18%
57	år	93	0.17%
58	alla	92	0.17%
59	detta	89	0.17%
60	åt	89	0.17%
61	ut	88	0.16%
62	Stockholm	87	0.16%
63	dessa	87	0.16%
64	genom	87	0.16%
65	även	86	0.16%
66	blev	86	0.16%
67	stora	85	0.16%
68	ännu	83	0.16%
69	gång	81	0.15%
70	alltid	80	0.15%
71	ofta	79	0.15%
72	denna	78	0.15%
73	när	78	0.15%
74	våra	78	0.15%
75	över	75	0.14%
76	ty	74	0.14%
77	andra	73	0.14%
78	in	72	0.13%
79	få	72	0.13%
80	dess	71	0.13%
81	tid	68	0.13%
82	väl	68	0.13%
83	aldrig	64	0.12%
84	Hilding	64	0.12%
85	Nyman	64	0.12%
86	endast	63	0.12%
87	mot	63	0.12%
88	också	62	0.12%
89	två	62	0.12%
90	gjorde	62	0.12%
91	fanns	62	0.12%
92	talet	61	0.11%
93	hela	61	0.11%
94	vilken	59	0.11%
95	någon	59	0.11%
96	låg	56	0.1%
97	nog	55	0.1%
98	gick	55	0.1%
99	bland	55	0.1%
100	mig	54	0.1%
101	hos	54	0.1%
102	Stockholms	54	0.1%
103	mera	53	0.1%
104	något	53	0.1%
105	några	52	0.1%
106	samt	52	0.1%
107	fingo	52	0.1%
108	Karl	52	0.1%
109	allt	51	0.1%
110	namn	51	0.1%
111	har	51	0.1%
112	vackra	51	0.1%
113	pojkar	51	0.1%
114	vara	50	0.09%
115	hava	48	0.09%
116	vilka	48	0.09%
117	stor	47	0.09%
118	hem	47	0.09%
119	såsom	47	0.09%
120	ganska	45	0.08%
121	mellan	44	0.08%
122	måste	44	0.08%
123	deras	43	0.08%
124	tiden	43	0.08%
125	annat	43	0.08%
126	varit	43	0.08%
127	far	41	0.08%
128	första	41	0.08%
129	unga	41	0.08%
130	därför	39	0.07%
131	se	39	0.07%
132	tog	39	0.07%
133	vårt	39	0.07%
134	många	38	0.07%
135	små	38	0.07%
136	samma	38	0.07%
137	dit	38	0.07%
138	större	37	0.07%
139	nästan	37	0.07%
140	staden	36	0.07%
141	gott	36	0.07%
142	ungdom	36	0.07%
143	skolan	36	0.07%
144	började	36	0.07%
145	mindre	36	0.07%
146	funnos	35	0.07%
147	komma	34	0.06%
148	huru	33	0.06%
149	redan	33	0.06%
150	lärare	33	0.06%
151	glada	33	0.06%
152	snart	33	0.06%
153	såg	33	0.06%
154	stadens	33	0.06%
155	ur	33	0.06%
156	kommo	33	0.06%
157	mor	32	0.06%
158	plats	32	0.06%
159	ned	32	0.06%
160	ju	32	0.06%
161	enda	32	0.06%
162	hennes	32	0.06%
163	emot	31	0.06%
164	vilket	31	0.06%
165	ville	31	0.06%
166	annan	31	0.06%
167	hörnet	31	0.06%
168	gå	31	0.06%
169	mitt	31	0.06%
170	fram	31	0.06%
171	gav	30	0.06%
172	början	30	0.06%
173	göra	29	0.05%
174	inom	29	0.05%
175	dagar	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):

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.