Under construction!

Rationale

I have been reminded that while Amazon might recommend similar books to ones you have selected, and Goodreads may allow users to rate, list and label books so that they can be found by others, neither site works well for finding books based on how easy they are. For example, we have user-produced lists on Goodreads, where, as soon as a classic book is added, it will appear at the top of the list due to many general ratings. Les Misèrables cannot be considered an easy book – even when read in translated form – and yet, if it is added to a list of easy books in French, it will end up near the top. So here is my page for a small selection of graded French readers, with my ratings of readability, enjoyability, and genre.

Explanation of Ranking Formula

Vocabulary ratings are based on vocabulary ranked according to frequency of occurrence in general text. Analysis is usually of the first 100 or so words, so may give a wrong impression for books that get harder as they go along. I’ve included Astérix to give some idea of where a comic book written for native French speakers would fall. Like most comics, it has short sentences on average, making the grammar relatively easy, but like most things for native speakers, a large vocabulary is required before it is a comfortable read. I’ve tried to include good representative works from different independent authors as well as publishers.

As you can see from the list, those written for learners tend to have smaller expected (type, not family) vocabulary sizes, rarely going above 10,000 (though some in my collection do). As for sentence length, this can vary considerably, but comics (and plays) tend to have shorter average sentence length, being mostly dialogue. My difficulty score ignores tenses, though this may be an additional impact.

The vocabulary density or type token ratio can make a difference as to how learnable the vocabulary is via repetition, which I don’t use in this ranking. As an extreme example, if you had a text that consisted entirely of “Euh !” repeated 100 times, it would have a type token ratio of 0.01 but since “Euh” isn’t in my word list, it would get a high vocabulary size score and a resulting difficulty score of 7.4. (I almost want to create this as a comic book for a laugh.)

Another extreme example is that a text that consists of a single 101 word sentence, going “Frank arrive et Jean arrive et Susanne arrive et…” etc. would get a score of 40.7 despite its expected vocabulary size of 2. Alternatively, if each arrival is a separate sentence and “et” isn’t used, the score would be less than 1. The largest possible score for a 100 word sample would be for a 100-word sentence where each word is out of vocabulary, resulting in a score of 47.

It should also be noted that typical French courses include certain vocabulary that has low general frequency, which can lead to a high vocabulary size here without seeming difficult (eg. “lundi” is ranked 7,796 in my list). Pictures also make things easier. At some point I may create a database that also provides for user input, but this is a start.

Title	Author	Published Level	Genre	Average sentence length	Vocab size for 95% coverage	Difficulty Score	Type Token Ratio	Tokens analysed	Estimated Total Text size (words)	Rating (1-5)
Gnomeville Episode 1	A. Uitdenbogerd	0	Fantasy	4.3	25	3.12	0.41		300	5
Gnomeville Episode 2	A. Uitdenbogerd	0	Fantasy	5.2	16	3.28	0.44		700	5
Édi l’éléphant	Emily Ibrahim	1	Animals	3.1	384	3.84	0.33	146	2100	2
Bonjour Luc (Luc et Sophie v1)	Barbara Scanes	1	Childhood	2.2	6,163	4.67	0.46		70	2
Jojo	Rachel Barnes	A1.1	Growing up	4.7	1,345	5.01				3
Gnomeville Episode 3	A. Uitdenbogerd	0	Fantasy	10.2	40	5.68			1,200	5
Il fait beau	Dennis Dunham		General	4.6	1,898	5.12		103
Kill the French	Vincent Serrano Guerra	0	General	8.8	41	5.13		95		2
Bonjour Berthe	Gwen Brookes	1	Magic	4.6	4,179	5.46				3
Le Pendentif	Sylvie Laine	A1-B1	General	5.9	1,600	5.56				4
Mystère au Louvre	theresa Marrama	advanced beginner	Adventure	6	1,546	5.59	0.57	109	4,800	3
Rencontres rapides	Kit Ember	A2	Romance	4.7	10,709	5.91		142		3
Astérix le gaulois		native	Fantasy/Historic	4.1	22,025	5.98		108		3
Quichotte et moi	Constanza Ontaneda	1	Children’s Adventure	6.7	2,421	6.06		107		3
Un problème à l’école	Fabulang	A1	Ghosts	6.7	2,560	6.09	0.70
Heather in Paris	Xana Belle	B1/B2	Romance	6.1	6,196	6.23	0.76	107		3
Drôle de rencontre	Céline Apatout	1	Fairy tale	4.9	46,141	6.62
Aventure dans la forêt enchantée	Elena Jagar	A1	Magic	7.6	4,726	6.71	0.64	114
Première Etape	Otto Bond		Adventure	12.2	316	7.38		100	50,000	4
Merde 1	France Dubin	beginner	general	7.9	7,836	7.05		137		4
Mes vies	Sini Lallemand	beginner	paranormal?	10.8	3,600	7.87		176		4
La ville de St Martin	Becky Tucker	1-B	general	12.43	6,342	8.77		174		3

(Includes Amazon affiliate links.)