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How hard is Le Petit Nicolas to read?
Nicholas
By Jean-Jacques Sempé · In French
- Words for 95% of the text
- 4,219
- Sentence length
- 18.3 words
- Words beyond the 5,000 most common
- 40 per 1,000
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In French, Le Petit Nicolas is a beginner read in our library. Its narrator is a schoolboy, and each short, self-contained story is told in the everyday words of home and the classroom, so the vocabulary needed is small and the words to learn are concrete: jam, ink, marbles, recess, standing in the corner. What takes getting used to is the childlike voice, which runs its clauses together into sentences longer than a children's book might suggest and leans on familiar, colloquial French; a fair share of dialogue breaks them up, and it makes a good first read before a novel for adults.
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
Easier than 98% 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
- 4,219
- Sentence length
- 18.3 words
- One sentence in ten runs past 37 words
- Length
- Short
- 29,511 words · < 3 hours
- Words beyond the 5,000 most common
- 40 per 1,000
- Dialogue
- 24%
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 | 71.6% |
| 250 | 78.2% |
| 500 | 82.4% |
| 1,000 | 86.1% |
| 2,000 | 90.4% |
| 3,000 | 93.2% |
| 5,000 | 96.0% |
| 7,500 | 97.0% |
| 10,000 | 98.0% |
| 15,000 | 99.1% |
| 20,000 | 99.4% |
| 30,000 | 99.7% |
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.
- drôlement×32
- cigare×25
- bouquet×17
- sandwich×17
- guignol×16
- piquet×16
- confiture×14
- arithmétique×13
- gifle×13
- récré×13
- chouchou×12
- fâché×12
- embrassé×11
- encre×11
- bille×10
- embêté×10
- gronder×10
- allumette×9
- cow×9
- récréation×9
Books at the same level in our library
Free to read, with the closest scores to this one.