At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

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AllSubNoDub
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby AllSubNoDub » Sat Oct 16, 2021 5:05 pm

Based on English versions of the book:

  • (# Total Words)/(# Distinct Words)
  • Philosopher’s Stone: 76944/4112 = 18.71
  • Chamber of Secrets: 85141/4939 = 17.24
  • Prisoner of Azkaban: 107253/5282 = 20.31
  • Goblet of Fire: 190637/6989 = 21.28
  • Order of the Phoenix: 257045/7908 = 32.50
  • Half-Blood Prince: 168923/7031 = 24.03
  • Deathly Hallows: 198227/7340 = 27.01

Fairly decent trend. Also, as I've said, sometimes it's just a lot of new words because the situations are different, e.g. learning more car related language in book 2. The guy who read all the books in English/Japanese started reading them in Italian, but he skipped from 1 to 4 and he said the jump was noticeable and intense.

So, graded within each book? Not really. Graded from book to book? Yes.
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby rpg » Sat Oct 16, 2021 7:43 pm

AllSubNoDub wrote:Based on English versions of the book:

  • (# Total Words)/(# Distinct Words)
  • Philosopher’s Stone: 76944/4112 = 18.71
  • Chamber of Secrets: 85141/4939 = 17.24
  • Prisoner of Azkaban: 107253/5282 = 20.31
  • Goblet of Fire: 190637/6989 = 21.28
  • Order of the Phoenix: 257045/7908 = 32.50
  • Half-Blood Prince: 168923/7031 = 24.03
  • Deathly Hallows: 198227/7340 = 27.01

Fairly decent trend. Also, as I've said, sometimes it's just a lot of new words because the situations are different, e.g. learning more car related language in book 2. The guy who read all the books in English/Japanese started reading them in Italian, but he skipped from 1 to 4 and he said the jump was noticeable and intense.

So, graded within each book? Not really. Graded from book to book? Yes.


This metric is meaningless, it mostly just correlates with book length. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaps%27_law

Someone mentioned Lexile scores up-thread and there's no trend in the Lexile scores in the HP books. Books 1 and 7 both have the same score.
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby AllSubNoDub » Sat Oct 16, 2021 8:01 pm

rpg wrote:
AllSubNoDub wrote:Based on English versions of the book:

  • (# Total Words)/(# Distinct Words)
  • Philosopher’s Stone: 76944/4112 = 18.71
  • Chamber of Secrets: 85141/4939 = 17.24
  • Prisoner of Azkaban: 107253/5282 = 20.31
  • Goblet of Fire: 190637/6989 = 21.28
  • Order of the Phoenix: 257045/7908 = 32.50
  • Half-Blood Prince: 168923/7031 = 24.03
  • Deathly Hallows: 198227/7340 = 27.01

Fairly decent trend. Also, as I've said, sometimes it's just a lot of new words because the situations are different, e.g. learning more car related language in book 2. The guy who read all the books in English/Japanese started reading them in Italian, but he skipped from 1 to 4 and he said the jump was noticeable and intense.

So, graded within each book? Not really. Graded from book to book? Yes.


This metric is meaningless, it mostly just correlates with book length. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaps%27_law

Someone mentioned Lexile scores up-thread and there's no trend in the Lexile scores in the HP books. Books 1 and 7 both have the same score.


I see you didn't read my post carefully. I divided total number of words by distinct number of words to give an average of when one new word would be encountered. Simple arithmetic gives you the answer.

Since you mentioned it, in my experience, lexile scores are meaningless, at least as posted on www.lexile.com. They weight sentence length heavily compared to number of distinct words - in my experience, only vocabulary really keeps foreign language books from being accessible to learners, rarely grammar and never sentence length. For example, The Grapes of Wrath scores 680L despite having 175477 TW/8330 DW = 21.07, because of its short sentence length. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is 880L. I've also noticed, there will be multiple lexile scores for a given book, even if there's no indication if one is a graded reader or not.
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby rpg » Sat Oct 16, 2021 8:50 pm

AllSubNoDub wrote:
rpg wrote:
AllSubNoDub wrote:Based on English versions of the book:

  • (# Total Words)/(# Distinct Words)
  • Philosopher’s Stone: 76944/4112 = 18.71
  • Chamber of Secrets: 85141/4939 = 17.24
  • Prisoner of Azkaban: 107253/5282 = 20.31
  • Goblet of Fire: 190637/6989 = 21.28
  • Order of the Phoenix: 257045/7908 = 32.50
  • Half-Blood Prince: 168923/7031 = 24.03
  • Deathly Hallows: 198227/7340 = 27.01

Fairly decent trend. Also, as I've said, sometimes it's just a lot of new words because the situations are different, e.g. learning more car related language in book 2. The guy who read all the books in English/Japanese started reading them in Italian, but he skipped from 1 to 4 and he said the jump was noticeable and intense.

So, graded within each book? Not really. Graded from book to book? Yes.


This metric is meaningless, it mostly just correlates with book length. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaps%27_law

Someone mentioned Lexile scores up-thread and there's no trend in the Lexile scores in the HP books. Books 1 and 7 both have the same score.


I see you didn't read my post carefully. I divided total number of words by distinct number of words to give an average of when one new word would be encountered. Simple arithmetic gives you the answer.

Since you mentioned it, in my experience, lexile scores are meaningless, at least as posted on www.lexile.com. They weight sentence length heavily compared to number of distinct words - in my experience, only vocabulary really keeps foreign language books from being accessible to learners, rarely grammar and never sentence length. For example, The Grapes of Wrath scores 680L despite having 175477 TW/8330 DW = 21.07, because of its short sentence length. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is 880L. I've also noticed, there will be multiple lexile scores for a given book, even if there's no indication if one is a graded reader or not.


On the contrary--you are the one who has not understood. The number of distinct words in a text grows sublinearly with the length of the text (the relationship is described in the Wikipedia link)--that means that the longer the text is, the larger the ratio will be. It doesn't tell you anything about difficulty. It's not a coincidence that the books with the largest and smallest ratios are the longest/shortest books.
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby AllSubNoDub » Sat Oct 16, 2021 10:15 pm

rpg wrote:
AllSubNoDub wrote:
rpg wrote:
AllSubNoDub wrote:Based on English versions of the book:

  • (# Total Words)/(# Distinct Words)
  • Philosopher’s Stone: 76944/4112 = 18.71
  • Chamber of Secrets: 85141/4939 = 17.24
  • Prisoner of Azkaban: 107253/5282 = 20.31
  • Goblet of Fire: 190637/6989 = 21.28
  • Order of the Phoenix: 257045/7908 = 32.50
  • Half-Blood Prince: 168923/7031 = 24.03
  • Deathly Hallows: 198227/7340 = 27.01

Fairly decent trend. Also, as I've said, sometimes it's just a lot of new words because the situations are different, e.g. learning more car related language in book 2. The guy who read all the books in English/Japanese started reading them in Italian, but he skipped from 1 to 4 and he said the jump was noticeable and intense.

So, graded within each book? Not really. Graded from book to book? Yes.


This metric is meaningless, it mostly just correlates with book length. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaps%27_law

Someone mentioned Lexile scores up-thread and there's no trend in the Lexile scores in the HP books. Books 1 and 7 both have the same score.


I see you didn't read my post carefully. I divided total number of words by distinct number of words to give an average of when one new word would be encountered. Simple arithmetic gives you the answer.

Since you mentioned it, in my experience, lexile scores are meaningless, at least as posted on www.lexile.com. They weight sentence length heavily compared to number of distinct words - in my experience, only vocabulary really keeps foreign language books from being accessible to learners, rarely grammar and never sentence length. For example, The Grapes of Wrath scores 680L despite having 175477 TW/8330 DW = 21.07, because of its short sentence length. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is 880L. I've also noticed, there will be multiple lexile scores for a given book, even if there's no indication if one is a graded reader or not.


On the contrary--you are the one who has not understood. The number of distinct words in a text grows sublinearly with the length of the text (the relationship is described in the Wikipedia link)--that means that the longer the text is, the larger the ratio will be. It doesn't tell you anything about difficulty. It's not a coincidence that the books with the largest and smallest ratios are the longest/shortest books.


So according to this, book 4 should have several hundred more distinct words than book 6, yet book 6 has more distinct words.
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby Xenops » Sat Oct 16, 2021 10:44 pm

Sorry to interrupt, but is there a more civil way to discuss this?
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby AllSubNoDub » Sat Oct 16, 2021 10:50 pm

Xenops wrote:Sorry to interrupt, but is there a more civil way to discuss this?


Who's being uncivil?
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby AllSubNoDub » Sun Oct 17, 2021 12:20 am

I fed in the first ~77k words (size of the first book) of each of the first four books into my own software and these were the numbers I came up with:

  • HP1: 6745 Distinct Words
  • HP2: 7730 Distinct Words
  • HP3: 7765 Distinct Words
  • HP4: 8144 Distinct Words

Feel free to analyze the rest or do your own analysis, I'd be curious. It's not perfect, since this only considered tokens and not headwords, and I also didn't take into account proper names (but based on repeats, they seemed to roughly match in number), etc. but I think this is good enough to show a trend (barring a deus ex machina of some obscure linguistic observation).
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby Yunus39 » Mon Oct 18, 2021 8:50 am

AllSubNoDub wrote:I fed in the first ~77k words (size of the first book) of each of the first four books into my own software and these were the numbers I came up with:

  • HP1: 6745 Distinct Words
  • HP2: 7730 Distinct Words
  • HP3: 7765 Distinct Words
  • HP4: 8144 Distinct Words

Feel free to analyze the rest or do your own analysis, I'd be curious. It's not perfect, since this only considered tokens and not headwords, and I also didn't take into account proper names (but based on repeats, they seemed to roughly match in number), etc. but I think this is good enough to show a trend (barring a deus ex machina of some obscure linguistic observation).


I just want to pop in and say that I adore these kinds of break-downs and analyses. Thanks for doing both. Really interesting. I hope to attack HP in Bangla soon.
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby Cavesa » Tue Oct 19, 2021 10:41 am

In Spanish at B1/B2, not sure anymore.

In English: approximately A2. Of course it was not a comfortable level, but I could follow the story and not wait half a year for the official translation of the book. It helped a lot actually and clearly illustrated how motivation can be more important than just "readiness" in terms of the language skills.

It is usually said that HP is sort of "graded" too, with the later books being harder than the early ones. It may be true to some extent, but I am no longer convinced the difference is so huge. The fact the longer books containing more distinct words is due to them being longer imho. Even if you take into account the ratio words/unique words as counted by AllSubNoDub. But I don't think the amount of words is the only important factor, when we talk about a book's difficulty.
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