German text difficulty checker
Paste any German text here — a news article, a recipe, a podcast transcript, a page from a novel — and Beeblio will tell you exactly how much of it falls within your current vocabulary. Each word is ranked by how often it appears in real German, using the wordfreq corpus, then sorted into frequency bands: the top 300, 800, 1,500 words, and so on up to 12,000. Words beyond that are marked as rare.
The results show you the share of the text covered at each band, so you can judge at a glance whether a piece of German is comfortable reading, a gentle stretch, or still out of reach. You also get a list of the new words you'd need to learn to unlock more of the text — which is far more useful than a single "difficulty score" that hides where the real gaps are.
Comprehensible input works best when you understand roughly 95–98% of a text. Use this checker to find German content that sits right at your growing edge, rather than spending twenty minutes on something that's simply too dense to be enjoyable.
How it works
Paste a text in German (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 frequency bands actually mean?
Each band groups words by how commonly they appear in everyday German. The top 300 words are the most frequent — things like <em>und</em>, <em>sein</em>, <em>haben</em> — while the 3,000- or 5,000-word band contains less common vocabulary you'd meet in newspapers or novels. If most of a text's words fall within the top 1,500, that text uses fairly everyday language; a high share of 5,000+ words signals more specialist or literary content.
My text contains names and proper nouns — will they skew the results?
Proper nouns like place names and people's names are typically very rare in any frequency list, so they'll show up in the highest bands or as unknown words. It's worth mentally discounting them when you read your results, since knowing a character's name doesn't require vocabulary study.
How is this different from a standard readability score like Flesch–Kincaid?
Traditional readability formulas measure things like average sentence length and syllable count, which don't tell you much about what a language learner actually needs to know. Beeblio's checker is based on word frequency, so it shows you specifically which words are likely to be unfamiliar and how many of them appear in the text — directly actionable information for your study.