French reading difficulty

Le comte de Monte-Cristo, Tome I

Reading Le comte de Monte-Cristo, Tome I means meeting about 123,566 words, 81.9% of which are built from the two thousand commonest words of the language. It is measured at 47/100 against the other books on this shelf. At a learner's pace it is roughly 16 h of reading.

Total words123,566
Distinct words11,012
Difficulty47/100
Time to read16 h
GenreAdventure

Vocabulary diversity

11,012 distinct words across 123,566 words of text. Longer books will almost always show more, so this is worth comparing only between books of a similar length.

How much of it you would already know

81.9% of the running text is built from the two thousand commonest words in the language. That is the measurement this shelf can make honestly: no CEFR-graded wordlist exists for it, so no CEFR level is claimed.

How it reads

Average sentence20.3 words
Sentence length, 99th percentile91 words
Average word4.48 letters
Dialogue16.9% of the text

Where it gets harder

The book was split into ten equal spans and each measured on its own. Reading left to right, the scores are 38, 43, 45, 46, 49, 52, 57, 47, 41, 53. The hardest span is the seventh and the easiest is the first, so a sample from the opening is not always a fair test of the whole book.

The words it leans on

Words that recur in this book and sit above the everyday vocabulary. These are the ones worth tapping the first time they appear:

Where to get it, free and legally

This book is in the public domain. Download it as an EPUB from Project Gutenberg, then open it in ClickBook.

Reading it without stopping every line

At 18.1% uncommon words, a book this size will still hand you words you do not know — that is what makes it worth reading. What slows people down is not meeting the word, it is leaving the page to look it up. ClickBook explains the word where it stands, using the sentence around it, and you keep reading.

What ClickBook is →