Danish text difficulty checker
Paste any Danish text here — a news article, a children's book page, a recipe, a song lyric — and Beeblio breaks it down by word frequency. Each word is colour-coded by band: the 300 most common Danish words, the next 500 up to 800, then 1,500, 3,000, 5,000, 8,000, and 12,000. Words beyond that are marked as rare. Frequency ranks come from the wordfreq corpus, the same data that underlies Beeblio's reader.
At a glance you can see what share of the text sits inside your comfort zone and which words are new to you. A text where you already know around 95% of the tokens is generally considered a good target for comprehensible input — stretchy enough to push your vocabulary, readable enough to stay enjoyable. The checker shows you exactly where a given text lands on that scale.
Use it to pick graded readers, judge whether a Danish podcast transcript is worth tackling this week, or spot the handful of words standing between you and full understanding. No account needed — just paste and check.
How it works
Paste a text in Danish (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 corresponds to a frequency band: the 300 most common Danish words, up to 800, 1,500, 3,000, 5,000, 8,000, and 12,000. A word's band tells you roughly how often it appears in everyday Danish — a band-1 word like <em>og</em> (and) is everywhere, while a band-6 word might appear only in specialist or literary texts.
How do I know if a text is the right difficulty for me?
A widely used rule of thumb is that you should understand about 95% of the running words in a text for reading to feel manageable and for new words to sink in through context. Check the coverage percentage the tool shows for your current vocabulary level, and aim for texts where only a small slice falls outside it.
Does the checker handle Danish word forms like inflections and compounds?
Yes — wordfreq, the corpus Beeblio's frequency data is drawn from, works at the word-form level and includes common inflected forms found in real Danish text. Very long compound words that are assembled on the fly may occasionally be treated as rare even if their parts are common, so use that as a cue to look them up rather than assuming they're truly infrequent.