Create a free account to learn as you read
Create a free account to learn as you read
How hard is Boule de Suif to read?
By Guy de Maupassant · In French
- Words for 95% of the text
- 10,074
- Sentence length
- 16.3 words
- Words beyond the 5,000 most common
- 91 per 1,000
It is in our free library: open it and read it with a tap-to-translate dictionary.
Boule de Suif sits at an intermediate level in French. It is a short naturalist tale of a stagecoach journey during the Franco-Prussian War, told in literary sentences of moderate length, and it needs a large vocabulary: a good share of the running words are uncommon ones, such as period terms for coaches, inns and fireplaces. About a quarter of the text is dialogue, with some spoken contractions in the characters' speech. It suits a reader who is comfortable with plain narrative French and ready for nineteenth-century prose.
MnemoRead measured this book from its full text: how many of the language's most common words you need to follow it, and how long its sentences are.
How hard this book is
Harder than 50% of our French books
The score rises with the words needed to cover 95% of the text and with sentence length. It is the same in every language. Books within about ten points of each other read about as hard.
- Words for 95% of the text
- 10,074
- Sentence length
- 16.3 words
- One sentence in ten runs past 36 words
- Length
- Short
- 38,503 words · < 3 hours
- Words beyond the 5,000 most common
- 91 per 1,000
- Dialogue
- 27%
Vocabulary needed
Share of the text covered by the most common words of the language.
Names of people and places count as known words.
Show the numbers
| Most common words | Share of the text |
|---|---|
| 100 | 59.7% |
| 250 | 67.1% |
| 500 | 72.5% |
| 1,000 | 78.2% |
| 2,000 | 84.1% |
| 3,000 | 87.1% |
| 5,000 | 90.9% |
| 7,500 | 93.3% |
| 10,000 | 94.9% |
| 15,000 | 96.6% |
| 20,000 | 97.5% |
| 30,000 | 98.5% |
CEFR word lists
Share of the text each level's words cover, with the levels below it. The book's vocabulary is rated at the first level to reach 95%.
Words to learn first
The words this book uses most that are not among the 5,000 most common of the language, with how often each appears.
- suifĂ—41
- songerĂ—28
- prussienĂ—27
- comtesseĂ—18
- brusquementĂ—17
- fût×14
- murmurerĂ—14
- cocherĂ—13
- v'lĂ Ă—12
- bûche×11
- cheminée×11
- Ă©paveĂ—11
- balbutierĂ—9
- demoiselleĂ—9
- aimableĂ—8
- assurément×8
- aubergeĂ—8
- filletteĂ—8
- flotĂ—8
- immobileĂ—8
Books at the same level in our library
Free to read, with the closest scores to this one.