Unga Roberts resa till Grönland för att uppsöka sin fader by Franz Hoffmann : Difficulty Assessment for Swedish Learners

How difficult is Unga Roberts resa till Grönland för att uppsöka sin fader for Swedish learners? We have performed multiple tests on its full text (freely available here) of approximately 11,833, crunched all the numbers for you and present the results below.

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Difficulty Assessment Summary

We have estimated Unga Roberts resa till Grönland för att uppsöka sin fader to have a difficulty score of 71. Here're its scores:

Measure Score
easy difficult (1 - 100)
Overall Difficulty 71% 71
Vocabulary Difficulty 85% 85
Grammatical Difficulty 57% 57

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 Unga Roberts resa till Grönland för att uppsöka sin fader'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 Unga Roberts resa till Grönland för att uppsöka sin fader:

Vocabulary difficulty breakdown for Unga Roberts resa till Grönland för att uppsöka sin fader: a test for Swedish top frequency vocabulary

We have also calculated the following approximate data on the vocabulary in Unga Roberts resa till Grönland för att uppsöka sin fader:

Measure Score
Measure Score
Number of words 11,833
Number of unique words 3,422
Number of recognized words for names/places/other entities 587
Number of very rare non-entity words 771
Number of sentences 1,903
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 3,353 words (where all the forms of the word are still counted as unique words) in Swedish to be able to read Unga Roberts resa till Grönland för att uppsöka sin fader without a dictionary and fully understand it.

Grammatical Difficulty: Breakdown

57%

Grammatical difficulty: 57%

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 7
Type/Token Ratio (TTR) 0.289191
Root type/Token Ratio (RTTR) 0.0000244394
Corrected type/Token Ratio (CTTR) 0.0000122197
MTLD Index 79
HDD Index 69
Yule's I Index 82
Lexical Diversity Index (MTLD + HD-D + Yule's I) 76

The type-token ratio (TTR) of Unga Roberts resa till Grönland för att uppsöka sin fader is 0.289191. 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 3,422, while the number of words is 11,833, so the TTR is 3,422 / 11,833 = 0.289191. 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, 3,422 / (11,833 * 11,833) = 0.0000244394), while in CTTR, it is divided by a square of the number of words, multiplied twice 3,422 / 2 * (11,833 * 11,833) = 0.0000122197). 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 76 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 57.

Other Information about Unga Roberts resa till Grönland för att uppsöka sin fader by Franz Hoffmann

We provide you a sample of the text below, however, the full text of the Unga Roberts resa till Grönland för att uppsöka sin fader is also available free of charge on our website.

Sample of text:

I början af November höjde sig solen ej öfver himlabrynet, utan stannade der liksom fast-bunden. Men dagsljuset var stundom af en egen- artad skönhet. Ett rosigt skimmer utbredde sig öfver himlen, blekast i zenith, sedan öfvergående från rödt till violett, och från violett till ett skim- rande purpur, som bebrämade hela horisonten. Då fullmånen gick upp, såg han i början ut som en stor lusteld, och ju högre han steg, dess mer silfver göt han öfver de glänsande ismassorna och utbredde ett mildt ljus öfver snöfälten. Stjer- norna gnistrade ej mer, utan brunno i en stilla glans; de sågo ut som hål borrade i det djupblå hvalfvet. Vinternatten var snart inne. Mot slutet af ...

Top most frequently used words in Unga Roberts resa till Grönland för att uppsöka sin fader by Franz Hoffmann*

Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
Position Word Repetitions Part of all words
1 och 432 3.65%
2 en 219 1.85%
3 att 198 1.67%
4 138 1.17%
5 som 136 1.15%
6 han 133 1.12%
7 man 129 1.09%
8 till 127 1.07%
9 med 127 1.07%
10 sig 127 1.07%
11 de 118 1%
12 af 116 0.98%
13 för 110 0.93%
14 den 104 0.88%
15 det 104 0.88%
16 ett 101 0.85%
17 var 98 0.83%
18 Robert 92 0.78%
19 hade 89 0.75%
20 Hans 78 0.66%
21 sin 70 0.59%
22 icke 65 0.55%
23 honom 60 0.51%
24 58 0.49%
25 vi 57 0.48%
26 der 52 0.44%
27 om 51 0.43%
28 men 45 0.38%
29 upp 44 0.37%
30 vid 43 0.36%
31 sina 41 0.35%
32 mot 40 0.34%
33 39 0.33%
34 jag 39 0.33%
35 ej 38 0.32%
36 åter 37 0.31%
37 öfver 37 0.31%
38 är 37 0.31%
39 dem 36 0.3%
40 måste 35 0.3%
41 från 35 0.3%
42 kapten 33 0.28%
43 nu 33 0.28%
44 kunde 33 0.28%
45 efter 32 0.27%
46 kom 31 0.26%
47 åt 30 0.25%
48 kaptenen 30 0.25%
49 mig 29 0.25%
50 Becker 29 0.25%
51 allt 29 0.25%
52 voro 29 0.25%
53 ut 29 0.25%
54 här 28 0.24%
55 eller 28 0.24%
56 alla 27 0.23%
57 Griffin 26 0.22%
58 oss 26 0.22%
59 något 25 0.21%
60 sade 25 0.21%
61 andra 24 0.2%
62 skulle 23 0.19%
63 min 22 0.19%
64 utan 21 0.18%
65 denna 20 0.17%
66 hundarne 20 0.17%
67 några 20 0.17%
68 steg 20 0.17%
69 endast 20 0.17%
70 under 19 0.16%
71 fann 19 0.16%
72 isen 19 0.16%
73 gick 18 0.15%
74 har 18 0.15%
75 gjorde 17 0.14%
76 väl 17 0.14%
77 hon 17 0.14%
78 in 16 0.14%
79 sitt 16 0.14%
80 blef 16 0.14%
81 vara 16 0.14%
82 såg 16 0.14%
83 mer 16 0.14%
84 hvilka 16 0.14%
85 göra 15 0.13%
86 ha 15 0.13%
87 sedan 15 0.13%
88 Gud 15 0.13%
89 14 0.12%
90 hvilken 14 0.12%
91 hafvet 14 0.12%
92 varit 14 0.12%
93 någon 14 0.12%
94 hvad 14 0.12%
95 svarade 14 0.12%
96 ned 14 0.12%
97 ombord 13 0.11%
98 liksom 13 0.11%
99 detta 13 0.11%
100 än 13 0.11%
101 dock 13 0.11%
102 långt 13 0.11%
103 äfven 13 0.11%
104 godt 13 0.11%
105 derpå 13 0.11%
106 ty 13 0.11%
107 komma 13 0.11%
108 Ellenor 12 0.1%
109 länge 12 0.1%
110 finna 12 0.1%
111 låg 12 0.1%
112 mod 12 0.1%
113 väg 12 0.1%
114 längre 12 0.1%
115 ännu 12 0.1%
116 par 12 0.1%
117 skeppet 12 0.1%
118 se 12 0.1%
119 ur 12 0.1%
120 stod 12 0.1%
121 omkring 12 0.1%
122 tog 11 0.09%
123 hufvudet 11 0.09%
124 kunna 11 0.09%
125 stund 11 0.09%
126 11 0.09%
127 Hoppet 11 0.09%
128 stranden 11 0.09%
129 snart 11 0.09%
130 mycket 11 0.09%
131 tid 10 0.08%
132 vidare 10 0.08%
133 dessa 10 0.08%
134 slädar 10 0.08%
135 samma 10 0.08%
136 vår 10 0.08%
137 son 10 0.08%
138 kommit 10 0.08%
139 fram 10 0.08%
140 derföre 10 0.08%
141 ni 10 0.08%
142 far 10 0.08%
143 ning 10 0.08%
144 första 10 0.08%
145 dig 10 0.08%
146 blefvo 9 0.08%
147 Riley 9 0.08%
148 ville 9 0.08%
149 rätt 9 0.08%
150 hafva 9 0.08%
151 Cap 9 0.08%
152 deras 9 0.08%
153 båt 9 0.08%
154 land 9 0.08%
155 sista 9 0.08%
156 följde 9 0.08%
157 ropade 9 0.08%
158 slädarne 9 0.08%
159 nog 9 0.08%
160 is 9 0.08%
161 tillbaka 9 0.08%
162 er 9 0.08%
163 god 8 0.07%
164 föda 8 0.07%
165 tre 8 0.07%
166 visade 8 0.07%
167 äro 8 0.07%
168 hundar 8 0.07%
169 satte 8 0.07%
170 redan 8 0.07%
171 kring 8 0.07%
172 henne 8 0.07%
173 vände 8 0.07%
174 genast 8 0.07%
175 lade 8 0.07%
176 våra 8 0.07%
177 blifvit 8 0.07%
178 lifsmedel 8 0.07%
179 gång 8 0.07%
180 skall 8 0.07%
181 yttrade 8 0.07%

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 Unga Roberts resa till Grönland för att uppsöka sin fader by Franz Hoffmann

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.