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Judging Difficulty of Foreign Literature

 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading Post Reply
13 messages over 2 pages: 1
Doitsujin
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 Message 9 of 13
26 March 2014 at 11:59am | IP Logged 
sctroyenne wrote:
In English there's Lexile which measures reading difficulty.

In theory, this seems like a good idea, but since this is a proprietary method, it's hard to tell whether this is any better than the established readability tests, whose algorithms are well-known.

@ScottScheule: AFAIK, the technical term for adapted orginal books is "graded reader." BTW, if you search archive.org for easy reader or XXX reader (replace XXX with the language) you'll find some Public Domain graded readers for popular languages.
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Serpent
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 Message 10 of 13
26 March 2014 at 2:23pm | IP Logged 
No, graded readers are graded. They presume that you know, say, 500-1000 words, and they gradually introduce more, counting them as known after what they consider to be enough instances. Adapted literature is adapted literature, most standalone adapted books are bigger than graded readers. For example, if you really want to read a particular work, you can read an adapted version first, perhaps more than once and with vocab lists etc, and then read the real thing.
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Doitsujin
Diglot
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 Message 11 of 13
26 March 2014 at 7:20pm | IP Logged 
Serpent wrote:
No, graded readers are graded. [...] Adapted literature is adapted literature, most standalone adapted books are bigger than graded readers.

That's not necessarily the case. According to Wikipedia:

Quote:
Graded readers can be adapted from literary classics, films, biographies, travel books, etc., or they can be originals written specifically at a less demanding language level. Although they employ simplified language, graded readers do not necessarily lack narrative depth or avoid complex themes; often, they cover the same range of 'serious' themes as books written for native speaker audiences.

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Serpent
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 Message 12 of 13
26 March 2014 at 8:01pm | IP Logged 
I don't see a contradiction. Graded readers are those where the vocab is introduced gradually, often with a set of words per volume/part. Most adapted books are not graded, they just use a consistently small set of vocabulary. Basically, there's an overlap between adapted literature and graded readers, but one is not the other.
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Elanguest
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 Message 13 of 13
12 May 2014 at 10:14am | IP Logged 
Sometimes the best way is just to open the book and see how much you understand or don't. :) Libraries are great
for that, since they're free and allow a lot more in the way of browsing. :)


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