Catalan text difficulty checker
Paste any Catalan text here and Beeblio will show you, word by word, how much of it sits within your current vocabulary. Each word is coloured by frequency band — from the 300 most common Catalan words right up to those beyond the 12,000-word mark — so you can see at a glance whether a news article, a novel excerpt or a WhatsApp message is comfortably within your reach or a genuine stretch.
The checker highlights new words you haven't met yet and flags rare words that even fluent readers encounter infrequently. Frequency ranks come from the wordfreq corpus, which draws on a wide range of real written Catalan. Because the ~1,500 most frequent words cover about 80% of everyday text, knowing which band a piece sits in tells you something concrete: a text heavy in band-1 and band-2 words is solid comprehensible input; one packed with band-6 and band-7 words will need a dictionary nearby.
There's nothing to install. Paste your text, read the breakdown, and decide whether to push through the challenge or find something better matched to where you are right now.
How it works
Paste a text in Catalan (up to 6,000 characters). Every word is looked up in a frequency list; for each band — the top 300, 800, 1,500, 3,000, 5,000, 8,000 and 12,000 words — you see the share of the text a learner at that band already knows. Comprehensible reading sits around 95–98% known: we call ≥97% easy, 92–97% just right, 85–92% hard, and below that too hard.
You also get the new words worth learning (unknown but common, in frequency order) and the rare words — names, jargon, typos — that no learner should stop for.
Questions
What do the colour bands actually mean?
Each colour represents a frequency band based on how often a word appears in real Catalan text. Band 1 covers the 300 most frequent words, band 2 reaches up to 800, and so on through 1,500 / 3,000 / 5,000 / 8,000 / 12,000. Words beyond 12,000 are considered rare. The darker or more distinct the colour, the less common the word.
Where do the word frequency ranks come from?
Ranks are drawn from the wordfreq corpus, a large, open dataset built from a wide variety of real-world text sources. It's the same data Beeblio uses across all supported languages, so the rankings reflect genuine usage rather than a single source like news or literature alone.
Can I use this checker to decide which Catalan texts to read next?
Yes — that's one of the most practical uses. If a text shows that most of its words fall in bands 1–3 with just a handful of unknowns, it's likely good comprehensible input for your level. If bands 5–7 dominate, the text may be worth saving for later when your vocabulary has grown.