Text difficulty checker — how hard is this text for a learner?
Paste any text — a news article, a recipe, a subtitles excerpt — and Beeblio will tell you how much of it a learner at each vocabulary level can realistically read. Every word is ranked by frequency using the wordfreq corpus and sorted into bands: the 300 most common words of the language, then 800, 1,500, 3,000, 5,000, 8,000, and 12,000. Because the top 1,500 words cover roughly 80% of everyday text, even an intermediate learner can follow a lot — but that last 20% is where difficulty hides, and this tool shows it to you word by word.
The checker works across 22 languages. Once you paste your text, you'll see a breakdown of what share of tokens fall inside each frequency band, a list of words that would be new at your chosen level, and the rarest words in the passage — the ones most likely to trip a learner up. It takes about five seconds and needs no account.
Use it to pick reading material that stretches you without overwhelming you, to trim a text before sharing it with students, or simply to satisfy your curiosity about why a passage feels harder than expected.
How it works
Paste a text in any of 22 languages (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.
By language
- Catalan text difficulty
- Czech text difficulty
- Danish text difficulty
- Dutch text difficulty
- English text difficulty
- Filipino text difficulty
- Finnish text difficulty
- French text difficulty
- German text difficulty
- Greek text difficulty
- Hungarian text difficulty
- Indonesian text difficulty
- Italian text difficulty
- Norwegian text difficulty
- Polish text difficulty
- Portuguese text difficulty
- Romanian text difficulty
- Russian text difficulty
- Spanish text difficulty
- Swedish text difficulty
- Turkish text difficulty
- Ukrainian text difficulty
Questions
What does the difficulty score actually measure?
It measures vocabulary coverage: what percentage of the words in your text fall within the most frequent 300, 800, 1,500, 3,000, 5,000, 8,000, or 12,000 words of the language, based on the wordfreq frequency corpus. A text where 95% of words sit inside the top 1,500 will feel very different from one where only 70% do — even if both look the same length.
Which languages does the checker support?
The checker supports 22 languages, including major European languages, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and more. Word frequency rankings come from the wordfreq corpus, which draws on a broad range of real-world written sources for each language.
Should I aim for a text where I know every word?
Not necessarily — comprehensible input research suggests that understanding around 95–98% of the running words in a text is a comfortable reading zone where you can pick up new vocabulary in context. Use the band breakdown to find texts where most words are familiar but a handful of new ones keep things interesting.