Två somrar i Norra Ishafvet, Senare delen, Spanande efter Andrée i Nordöstra Grönland by Alfred Nathorst : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Två somrar i Norra Ishafvet, Senare delen, Spanande efter Andrée i Nordöstra Grönland for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 96,687, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Två somrar i Norra Ishafvet, Senare delen, Spanande efter Andrée i Nordöstra Grönland to have a difficulty score of 70. Here're its scores:

Measure Score
easy difficult (1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty 70% 70
Vocabulary Difficulty 79% 79
Grammatical Difficulty 61% 61

Vocabulary Difficulty: Breakdown

79%

Vocabulary difficulty: 79%

This score has been calculated based on frequency vocabulary (the top most frequently used words in Swedish). It combines various measures of Två somrar i Norra Ishafvet, Senare delen, Spanande efter Andrée i Nordöstra Grönland'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 somrar i Norra Ishafvet, Senare delen, Spanande efter Andrée i Nordöstra Grönland:

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for Två somrar i Norra Ishafvet, Senare delen, Spanande efter Andrée i Nordöstra Grönland: a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Två somrar i Norra Ishafvet, Senare delen, Spanande efter Andrée i Nordöstra Grönland:

Measure Score
Measure Score
Number of words 96,687
Number of unique words 13,045
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities 4,067
Number of very rare non-entity words 13,031
Number of sentences 15,313
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 12,784 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Två somrar i Norra Ishafvet, Senare delen, Spanande efter Andrée i Nordöstra Grönland without a dictionary and fully understand it.

Grammatical Difficulty: Breakdown

61%

Grammatical difficulty: 61%

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 9
Type/Token Ratio (TTR) 0.13492
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR) 0.00000139543
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR) 0.000000697715
MTLD Index 68
HDD Index 72
Yule's I Index 95
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I) 78

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Två somrar i Norra Ishafvet, Senare delen, Spanande efter Andrée i Nordöstra Grönland is 0.13492. 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 13,045, while the number of words is 96,687, so the TTR is 13,045 / 96,687 = 0.13492. 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, 13,045 / (96,687 * 96,687) = 0.00000139543), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 13,045 / 2 * (96,687 * 96,687) = 0.000000697715). 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 78 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 61.

Other Information about Två somrar i Norra Ishafvet, Senare delen, Spanande efter Andrée i Nordöstra Grönland by Alfred Nathorst

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Två somrar i Norra Ishafvet, Senare delen, Spanande efter Andrée i Nordöstra Grönland is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

Klockan tre lossades förtöjningen, och vi gingo i nästan isfritt vatten och stilla sjö söderut långs Liverpoolkusten; drifisen syntes långt i öster. Denna kust visar en storslagen alpnatur af höga spetsiga toppar, med glacierer mellan bergen. Den doldes först delvis af tjocka, men denna lyfte sig så småningom uppåt och bildade slutligen en strimma, öfver hvilken bergstopparne höjde sig, medan bergens lägre delar syntes under densamma. Ett stort isberg, en väldig koloss, fotograferades; för att fullt fatta dettas jättelika dimensioner, måste man betänka, att den massa, som är under vattenytan, är cirka åtta gånger större än den, som synes öfver densamma. För att få någon utgångspunkt vid bedömandet af isbergets storlek, lät jag ro fångstbåten ...

Top most frequently used words in Två somrar i Norra Ishafvet, Senare delen, Spanande efter Andrée i Nordöstra Grönland by Alfred Nathorst*

Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
1 och 2,547 2.63%
2 af 1,877 1.94%
3 att 1,646 1.7%
4 1,553 1.61%
5 den 1,366 1.41%
6 en 1,221 1.26%
7 som 992 1.03%
8 till 945 0.98%
9 var 852 0.88%
10 det 838 0.87%
11 vi 818 0.85%
12 med 806 0.83%
13 de 785 0.81%
14 för 760 0.79%
15 hade 677 0.7%
16 jag 619 0.64%
17 ett 533 0.55%
18 vid 531 0.55%
19 sig 458 0.47%
20 från 455 0.47%
21 om 449 0.46%
22 440 0.46%
23 ej 422 0.44%
24 men 412 0.43%
25 där 339 0.35%
26 är 334 0.35%
27 äfven 331 0.34%
28 skulle 296 0.31%
29 294 0.3%
30 under 282 0.29%
31 han 266 0.28%
32 nu 264 0.27%
33 man 258 0.27%
34 kunde 257 0.27%
35 land 251 0.26%
36 icke 250 0.26%
37 voro 247 0.26%
38 mot 243 0.25%
39 ty 227 0.23%
40 öfver 225 0.23%
41 efter 223 0.23%
42 denna 223 0.23%
43 eller 213 0.22%
44 Kap 211 0.22%
45 såsom 195 0.2%
46 fjord 195 0.2%
47 mycket 194 0.2%
48 dock 192 0.2%
49 se 189 0.2%
50 här 189 0.2%
51 oss 187 0.19%
52 måste 181 0.19%
53 isen 180 0.19%
54 blef 174 0.18%
55 hvilka 170 0.18%
56 ut 165 0.17%
57 samt 165 0.17%
58 detta 164 0.17%
59 än 164 0.17%
60 sedan 159 0.16%
61 andra 150 0.16%
62 vara 149 0.15%
63 hvilken 147 0.15%
64 varit 141 0.15%
65 mig 140 0.14%
66 utan 140 0.14%
67 har 140 0.14%
68 sidan 138 0.14%
69 Grönland 137 0.14%
70 Dusén 128 0.13%
71 två 127 0.13%
72 hafva 125 0.13%
73 ännu 124 0.13%
74 dessa 123 0.13%
75 upp 123 0.13%
76 någon 123 0.13%
77 några 122 0.13%
78 långt 121 0.13%
79 genom 120 0.12%
80 något 118 0.12%
81 endast 116 0.12%
82 åter 115 0.12%
83 ned 114 0.12%
84 när 113 0.12%
85 ganska 113 0.12%
86 redan 113 0.12%
87 komma 112 0.12%
88 äro 112 0.12%
89 sin 109 0.11%
90 hvilket 107 0.11%
91 morgonen 106 0.11%
92 stora 106 0.11%
93 Frans 106 0.11%
94 blifvit 105 0.11%
95 Josefs 105 0.11%
96 in 105 0.11%
97 medan 104 0.11%
98 augusti 103 0.11%
99 ön 102 0.11%
100 hela 101 0.1%
101 syntes 100 0.1%
102 dem 99 0.1%
103 1899 99 0.1%
104 förut 99 0.1%
105 längre 98 0.1%
106 mellan 98 0.1%
107 sund 97 0.1%
108 ombord 97 0.1%
109 97 0.1%
110 fram 96 0.1%
111 fartyget 94 0.1%
112 alla 93 0.1%
113 jägmästaren 93 0.1%
114 kom 92 0.1%
115 fick 90 0.09%
116 89 0.09%
117 densamma 88 0.09%
118 stranden 88 0.09%
119 hvarför 87 0.09%
120 Antarctic 87 0.09%
121 klockan 86 0.09%
122 dess 86 0.09%
123 expeditionen 86 0.09%
124 kusten 86 0.09%
125 flere 85 0.09%
126 doktorn 85 0.09%
127 väl 85 0.09%
128 nära 85 0.09%
129 fotografi 84 0.09%
130 kan 83 0.09%
131 ju 83 0.09%
132 utanför 81 0.08%
133 östra 81 0.08%
134 kunna 81 0.08%
135 kommit 81 0.08%
136 is 80 0.08%
137 samma 80 0.08%
138 större 80 0.08%
139 stor 79 0.08%
140 först 78 0.08%
141 tre 76 0.08%
142 norr 76 0.08%
143 gamla 76 0.08%
144 half 76 0.08%
145 dag 76 0.08%
146 Åkerblom 75 0.08%
147 allt 74 0.08%
148 juli 73 0.08%
149 åt 73 0.08%
150 senare 73 0.08%
151 dit 72 0.07%
152 gingo 71 0.07%
153 Andrée 71 0.07%
154 honom 71 0.07%
155 söder 70 0.07%
156 tid 70 0.07%
157 fjorden 69 0.07%
158 13 68 0.07%
159 nog 68 0.07%
160 vår 68 0.07%
161 kommo 68 0.07%
162 första 68 0.07%
163 därför 68 0.07%
164 expedition 68 0.07%
165 berg 67 0.07%
166 sitt 67 0.07%
167 såg 67 0.07%
168 Bay 67 0.07%
169 grund 67 0.07%
170 nämligen 65 0.07%
171 nästan 65 0.07%
172 fanns 65 0.07%
173 par 65 0.07%
174 djur 65 0.07%
175 gick 64 0.07%
176 mindre 64 0.07%
177 sina 63 0.07%
178 år 62 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 Två somrar i Norra Ishafvet, Senare delen, Spanande efter Andrée i Nordöstra Grönland by Alfred Nathorst

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.