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Cover: Google Books

How hard is ソードアート・オンライン1 アインクラッド to read?

Sword Art Online 1: Aincrad

By 川原礫 · In Japanese

JLPT N1 vocabularyAdvancedNovella · 86,595 words
Words for 95% of the text
14,187
Sentence length
15.7 words
Words beyond the 5,000 most common
111 per 1,000

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The first volume of Sword Art Online is an advanced read in Japanese in our library. Kirito's first-person narration runs in sentences of ordinary length, and dialogue takes up only a modest part of the text; the difficulty is the vocabulary, which reaches the highest JLPT level and runs past its list, mixing the game's own terms (guilds, duels, teleportation, labyrinths) with the narrator's many verbs of gesture, such as nodding, murmuring and turning around. Readers who know online role-playing games will recognise much of that game vocabulary.

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

JLPT N1 vocabularyAdvancedAbout 70/100

Easier than 64% of our Japanese 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
14,187
Sentence length
15.7 words
One sentence in ten runs past 30 words
Length
Novella
86,595 words · ~3-8 hours
Words beyond the 5,000 most common
111 per 1,000
Dialogue
20%
Kanji among the characters
30%

Vocabulary needed

Share of the text covered by the most common words of the language.

50%60%70%80%90%100%95%1001,00010,00030,00014,187

Names of people and places count as known words.

Show the numbers
Most common wordsShare of the text
10057.2%
25065.0%
50069.9%
1,00075.2%
2,00081.0%
3,00085.1%
5,00088.9%
7,50091.6%
10,00093.0%
15,00095.3%
20,00096.6%
30,00098.2%

JLPT word lists

Share of the text each level's words cover, with the levels below it. N5 and N4 are the textbook lists; N3 to N1 are the words common in the novels learners grade at that level. No list covers a whole novel: literary and rare words lie outside it. The book's vocabulary is rated at the first level that covers nearly all of what the whole list covers (98.5%).

N5
59.9%
N4
70.5%
N3
82.8%
N2
85.4%
N1
87.7%

JLPT kanji

N5
18.4%
N4
39.0%
N3
68.2%
N2
78.1%
N1
92.4%

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.

  • ギルド×87
  • 迷宮×52
  • 転移×51
  • 頷く×49
  • 消滅×41
  • 無数×33
  • 呟く×31
  • 浮かべる×29
  • 結晶×29
  • 視界×29
  • 七十×26
  • デュエル×25
  • 不意×25
  • 微か×24
  • 竿×24
  • 団長×23
  • 振り向く×23
  • 片手×23
  • 瞳×23
  • 笑み×23

Books at the same level in our library

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