Dutch text difficulty checker
Paste any Dutch text here — a news article, a recipe, a chapter from a novel — and Beeblio will show you exactly how much of it falls within your current vocabulary. Each word is ranked by how often it appears in real Dutch, using the wordfreq corpus, and sorted into frequency bands: the 300 most common words, then the 800, 1,500, and so on up to 12,000. Words beyond that are flagged as rare.
The colour-coded breakdown tells you at a glance how hard a text really is. The roughly 1,500 most frequent Dutch words cover around 80% of everyday text, so if most of a passage sits inside that band, you can probably read it with a dictionary close by. If a lot of words land in the 3,000–8,000 range, the text will be a genuine stretch.
Use the word lists below the analysis to decide what to study before you read, or simply to pick texts that are just challenging enough to be useful — the sweet spot that linguists call comprehensible input.
How it works
Paste a text in Dutch (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 Dutch word belongs to?
Every word is looked up in the wordfreq corpus, a large collection of real-world text, and assigned a rank based on how often it appears in Dutch. That rank is then matched to Beeblio's bands — 300, 800, 1,500, 3,000, 5,000, 8,000, and 12,000 — so the number reflects genuine everyday usage rather than a dictionary editor's judgement.
Does the checker handle Dutch word forms like verb conjugations and plural nouns?
Yes. Beeblio lemmatises each word before looking it up, meaning it maps conjugated verbs and inflected nouns back to their base form. So 'liepen' (they walked) is counted alongside 'lopen' (to walk) in the same frequency band.
What is a good difficulty level to aim for as a learner?
A text is generally considered comprehensible input when you already know around 95–98% of the words in it — enough to guess the rest from context. The frequency breakdown on this page shows you that percentage directly, so you can quickly tell whether a text is too easy, just right, or a step too far for now.