How to rate the complexity level of a text for study

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This is just a quick thought that I haven’t thought much about (it’s tea-time) but:

We can import our own materials into lingQ, and use them as our own study materials, right? How do we assess the level of complexity of the material, other than using the “Blimey that looks hard!” rule-of thumb?

I wondered about using standard readability tests like the Automated Readability Index (see, e.g. Tests Document Readability). i’m not yet clear what all the stats actually mean, but I copied in some Cyrillic and at least the program didn’t fall over.

Clearly you can’t compare readability across languages. Russian is always going to score worse than English, because the inflexibility of the grammar and the prefixes and suffixes make for long words and long sentences. But it should work to at least rank your materials in a given subject, and help you decide whether to study Tolstoy before or after Tolkien.

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Helen,

My google documents does this analysis for me in English. I do not know if it will work for Russian.

What yo can do is import what you want and then LingQ will tell you how many unknown words there are for you. This indicator gets more accurate the more words you save and the more you read and update with LingQ. Keep LingQing!

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I hadn’t thought of using LingQ for stats. Good one.

Google documents stats don’t seem to work with Russian, even if you set the language to Russian instead of auto.

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