French text difficulty checker
Paste any French text here — a news article, a short story, a subtitle file, a recipe — and Beeblio will break it down by word frequency. Each word is assigned to a band based on how commonly it appears in real French, from the 300 most frequent words all the way out to 12,000 and beyond. You'll see instantly what share of the text falls within the words you likely already know, and which words are pulling the reading level up.
The frequency data comes from the wordfreq corpus, which is built from a broad mix of real-world French text, so the rankings reflect the language as it's actually used. The roughly 1,500 most frequent French words cover about 80% of everyday text, which means a learner at that threshold can already follow most of what they read — even if some gaps remain.
Use the results to decide whether a text is the right challenge for you right now, to build a vocabulary list from the unfamiliar words, or simply to understand why a particular passage feels harder than expected. No account needed; just paste and go.
How it works
Paste a text in French (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 mean?
Beeblio groups every French word into one of seven bands — 300, 800, 1,500, 3,000, 5,000, 8,000, and 12,000 — based on how often it appears across a large corpus of real French text. A word in the 300 band is among the most common in the language; a word beyond 12,000 is quite rare. The bands give you a quick sense of which words a learner at a given level should already recognise and which ones represent new territory.
How is the difficulty of a French text calculated?
The checker looks at every word in your pasted text, finds its frequency rank using the wordfreq corpus, and works out what percentage of the text belongs to each band. A text where most words sit in the top 1,500 will feel manageable for an intermediate learner; one with a high share of words beyond 5,000 will feel demanding even for advanced readers.
Can I use this to choose reading material at the right level for me?
Yes — that's one of the most practical uses. Paste a sample paragraph or two from something you're considering reading, and the breakdown will show you roughly how much vocabulary is already within your range and how many unfamiliar words you'd be likely to encounter per page. As a rough guide, comprehensible input tends to work best when the vast majority of words are already known, so the new ones can be picked up from context.