Indonesian text difficulty checker
Paste any Indonesian text here and Beeblio will break it down by word frequency in seconds. Every word is tagged against one of seven bands — the 300, 800, 1,500, 3,000, 5,000, 8,000, or 12,000 most common words in Indonesian, ranked using the wordfreq corpus — so you can see at a glance whether a text sits comfortably within your current vocabulary or whether it is full of words you have never met.
The results page shows you the share of words that fall into each frequency band, a list of words that are new at your chosen level, and a separate list of rare or very low-frequency words. That makes it straightforward to decide whether a text is good comprehensible input right now or better saved for later. As a rough guide, the 1,500 most frequent Indonesian words account for around 80% of everyday text, so knowing where a text sits relative to that threshold tells you a lot about how hard it will feel to read.
The checker works on any Indonesian text — news articles, short stories, subtitles, WhatsApp messages, song lyrics — just paste and go. No account needed.
How it works
Paste a text in Indonesian (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 represents the most common words in Indonesian up to that rank — so the 300 band contains the 300 most frequent words, the 800 band adds the next 500, and so on up to 12,000. A word sitting in the 300 band is something you will encounter constantly; a word in the 8,000 or 12,000 band is relatively rare and probably not worth prioritising until you have a solid foundation.
How do I use the results to choose what to read?
Look at the percentage of the text that falls within your current band and the bands below it — if around 95–98% of words are already familiar to you, the text is likely to be comfortable, enjoyable reading. If a large chunk sits in bands well above your level, consider setting the text aside and returning to it in a few months.
Where do the frequency rankings come from?
Beeblio uses the wordfreq corpus, a large multilingual dataset built from a wide range of real-world text sources, to rank how common each Indonesian word is. This gives more reliable, everyday-language rankings than a dictionary or a single text source alone would provide.