How hard is Effi Briest to read in German?

Theodor Fontane · German

How much of it will you understand?

The bigger your vocabulary, the fewer words stop you. Each row assumes you know that many of the most common German words and shows what a page of Effi Briest would then look like. A page here means 250 words, about one paperback page.

• If you know 1,000 words

  81%

  of the text

  47

  unfamiliar per page

  A real stretch

• If you know 2,000 words

  86.4%

  of the text

  34

  unfamiliar per page

  A real stretch

• If you know 3,000 words

  88.8%

  of the text

  28

  unfamiliar per page

  Challenging but workable

• If you know 5,000 words

  91.3%

  of the text

  22

  unfamiliar per page

  Challenging but workable

• If you know 8,000 words

  93.4%

  of the text

  17

  unfamiliar per page

  Very doable with a dictionary

• If you know 12,000 words

  95.1%

  of the text

  12

  unfamiliar per page

  Comfortable - a few look-ups

Most people read comfortably at about 5 unfamiliar words a page and can follow a story with a dictionary at around 12. Counts are word families, so sprechen, sprach, and gesprochen count once between them, the way you actually learn them.

The numbers

Where to read it free

Effi Briest is in the public domain. You can download the full German text from Project Gutenberg at no cost, in plain text or EPUB.

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Method: Difficulty is measured as vocabulary load. Every book is sampled at an equal 20,000 running words drawn evenly across the whole text, so a 900-page novel and a one-act play stay comparable. For each sample we count how many words on a 250-word page would still be unfamiliar to a reader who knows the 1,000 / 2,000 / 3,000 / 5,000 / 8,000 / 12,000 most common words in this corpus. Words are counted as families rather than forms - parle, parlait and parlé count once between them - because coverage thresholds in the reading research are stated over families, and counting raw forms would make "the 2,000 most common words" deliver barely 700 real ones. Families are approximated with per-language suffix rules, not a full dictionary, so the grouping is close but imperfect. The 0-100 score is relative to the other books in the same language: 1 is the easiest title in that collection and 100 the hardest, with an adjustment for long average sentences. Scores are not compared across languages, because each language's word list is built from its own corpus and a smaller corpus depresses every figure in it. Verse scores harder than prose at the same reading level, since poetry repeats common words less. This is a relative ranking within this collection, not a CEFR assessment. See all 48 German books ranked.