German reading difficulty

Soldan's Geschichte der Hexenprozesse. Zweiter Band

Reading Soldan's Geschichte der Hexenprozesse. Zweiter Band means meeting about 118,052 words, 65.9% of which are built from the two thousand commonest words of the language. It is measured at 88/100 against the other books on this shelf. At a learner's pace it is roughly 15 h of reading.

Total words118,052
Distinct words19,942
Difficulty88/100
Time to read15 h
GenreFiction

Vocabulary diversity

19,942 distinct words across 118,052 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

65.9% 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 sentence23.6 words
Sentence length, 99th percentile98 words
Average word5.65 letters
Dialogue23.7% 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 94, 85, 86, 87, 86, 91, 90, 83, 90, 86. The hardest span is the first and the easiest is the eighth, 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 34.1% 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 →