Text Difficulty Analyser
Estimate the CEFR level of any Arabic passage, and see the arithmetic behind it.
Text Difficulty Analyser is part of the Pro plan
Estimate the CEFR level of any Arabic passage, and see the arithmetic behind it.
Free tools you can use right now:
Paste an Arabic passage and find out whether it is pitched at the class you were going to give it to. The tool measures four things — how much of the passage sits inside a core beginner vocabulary, how long its sentences run, how long its words are, and how fully it is vowelled — weights them, and puts the result on the CEFR scale from A1 to C2. Every step is shown: each measure, its sub-score out of 100, the weight it carries, and what it contributed to the total, so you can disagree with the answer and see exactly where. It runs entirely in your browser, so nothing you paste is sent anywhere.
Read more about this
- Tashkīl: how much to leave on, and when to take it off — Real Arabic is written without vowels. Full vowelling forever produces learners who cannot read anything published; removing it too early produces guessing. A staged plan for getting from one to the other.
- Pitching an Arabic reading text at the right level — What actually makes an Arabic text hard, the unknown-word percentages worth aiming at, and how to bring a real text down a level without turning it into Arabic nobody writes.
Common questions
How is the level worked out?
Four measures, each scored from 0 to 100 and then weighted: how many words fall outside the built-in core list (40%), average sentence length (25%), average word length (20%) and harakat density (15%). Those add up to a single score out of 100, which maps to a band — under 20 is A1, under 34 A2, under 48 B1, under 62 B2, under 78 C1, and above that C2. The "How the score was reached" panel prints all of it.
Does it cope with prefixes and endings?
Yes. A word is also tried with its clitics peeled off — the definite article, the conjunctions and prepositions that attach to the front, the pronoun and plural endings that attach to the back, and the present-tense subject prefixes. Without that a list holding مدرسة would fail to match المدرسة, and ذهب would fail to match أذهب, which is most of a real sentence. Nothing is peeled if it would leave a stem shorter than three letters.
How big is the frequency list?
It holds 600 high-frequency forms: the function words, the common verbs in their bare past-tense form, and the everyday nouns of school, home, time, place and family that a beginners' course covers. That is deliberately small and it is not a lemma database. A word flagged as outside the list means "outside a beginner's core", not "rare". Use the tool to compare one passage against another rather than reading the band as a verdict.
Why does it say a passage with no harakat is harder?
Because for a learner it is — the vowels have to be supplied from knowledge of the word. It carries the smallest weight of the four measures, at 15%, precisely because unvowelled text is simply normal for Modern Standard Arabic; on its own it cannot push a passage up a band.
How long does the passage need to be?
Around 40 words is the point at which the averages start to mean something. Anything shorter is analysed anyway, with a warning, because a single long sentence can swing the sentence-length measure on its own.
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