Polish text difficulty checker
Paste any Polish text here — a news article, a song lyric, a recipe, a short story — and Beeblio will tell you how much of it falls within your current vocabulary. Every word is ranked by real-world frequency using the wordfreq corpus, then sorted into bands: the 300 most common Polish words, up to 800, 1,500, and beyond. You see immediately what share of the text you likely already know, and which words are new or rare.
The checker is especially useful for finding texts at the right level for comprehensible input — the idea that you learn best when you understand roughly 95–98% of what you read. If a text is full of words beyond the 1,500-word band, it may be too demanding right now. If almost everything sits inside your known range, you can read it comfortably and pick up the few unfamiliar words in context.
There is nothing to install or sign up for. Paste your Polish text, read the breakdown, and decide whether the passage is worth tackling today or saving for later.
How it works
Paste a text in Polish (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 often they appear in real Polish text, ranked using the wordfreq corpus. The first band covers the 300 most frequent Polish words; the bands then extend to 800, 1,500, 3,000, 5,000, 8,000, and 12,000. Words beyond 12,000 are very rare and unlikely to appear in everyday reading.
Does the checker handle Polish word forms correctly?
Yes. Beeblio lemmatises Polish words before looking them up, so inflected forms — different case endings, verb conjugations, and so on — are matched to the same base frequency rank. The noun 'książki' and 'książka', for example, are counted as the same word.
What difficulty level should I be aiming for?
Comprehensible input research suggests that understanding around 95–98% of a text is the sweet spot for picking up new language naturally. If the checker shows that most unknown words fall within the 1,500-word band or below, the text is a reasonable challenge; if large portions sit above 3,000, you may want to build more vocabulary first.