Filipino text difficulty checker
Paste any Filipino text here and Beeblio instantly shows you how much of it sits within your current vocabulary. Each word is matched against frequency bands — 300, 800, 1,500, 3,000, 5,000, 8,000, and 12,000 most common words — so you can see at a glance whether a news article, song lyric, or short story is comfortably readable or a genuine stretch.
The checker highlights new words you haven't met yet and flags rare words that fall outside even advanced vocabulary lists. This makes it easy to decide whether a text is good comprehensible input: linguists generally suggest that understanding around 95–98% of running words is the sweet spot for reading without frustration. The frequency ranks come from the wordfreq corpus, giving you a realistic picture of how common each word really is in everyday Filipino.
Use the results to pick texts that challenge you just enough, pull out a shortlist of high-value words to learn next, or track how your readable range grows over time. No account needed — just paste and go.
How it works
Paste a text in Filipino (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
How does Beeblio decide which frequency band a Filipino word belongs to?
Every word in your pasted text is looked up against the wordfreq corpus, which ranks words by how often they appear in real Filipino writing. Beeblio then places each word into the closest band — 300, 800, 1,500, 3,000, 5,000, 8,000, or 12,000 most frequent words — so the colours reflect genuine everyday usage, not a textbook word list.
What percentage of a text do I need to understand for comfortable reading?
Research on comprehensible input suggests that recognising about 95–98% of the running words in a text lets most readers follow the meaning without constantly stopping to look things up. If your coverage score is below that, the text may be better saved for later or used with a dictionary close at hand.
Does the checker handle Tagalog affixes and word forms correctly?
Beeblio looks up each word form as it appears in the text, relying on the frequency data in the wordfreq corpus which is built from real Filipino text and already reflects common affixed forms. Very rare or highly irregular inflections may occasionally be classed as unknown, but for most everyday reading material the results will be accurate.