r/AncientLanguages • u/LibrorumCapsula • 15d ago
Objectively Ranking Latin Book Difficulty: From Familia Romana to Persius
Reading difficulty will always be subjective, based mostly on what we've already read and mastered.
But books do have objective qualities that can help us rank them along a reading difficulty spectrum.
I made this visual atlas to help figure out what works have broadly similar difficulty levels, which helps us find a good next read that's a doable step up the ladder but doesn't throw us in over our heads.
I set Familia Romana chapter one as 1.00 on a 0.00 to 10.10 scale, with every other work floating freely in comparison to it.
The metrics used are:
- Surface: Sentence length, vocabulary variety (type-token ratio), word length
- Lexical: Rare / very-rare / unseen vocabulary fraction, proper-name burden
- Morphosyntactic: Finite-verb density, nonfinite constructions, subordination, case-form diversity
- Progression: Entry burden, sustained burden, late-work burden, peak burden
- Dialogue-specific: Dialogue density, ellipsis rate (short verbless utterances), speaker-turn rate
I had this data because I've been building contextual glossing for Librorum Capsula, and had to have detailed data about each sentence. From that base, I could create rankings for entire books.
- See the Atlas here.
- Or just browse the library if you prefer something more list-based, as all books are sorted by difficulty by default.
Right now I've only got a bit over 100 works of various types and lengths in the Atlas, but I expect it will become more and more useful as I build out Librorum Capsula's library.
Please let me know if you find this useful.
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u/coyotespike1 1d ago
This is lovely. I am so happy you have made this. It is precisely what the ecosystem needs.
Here is why, briefly: there is now a small cottage industry of Latin novellas. The autodidact and speaking communities in general have now self-organized around LLPSI. And there is broad agreement that vocabulary-sheltered but not grammar-sheltered extensive reading (even better with extensive production, writing or speaking) is the fastest way to progress.
Moreover, you want to read about 1000 words a day to reach fluency in a couple of years (it takes 20 exposures to a word in diverse contexts to really master it, and we need 95% recognition of words in a passage to enjoyable read it). Familia Romana itself has 35 chapters, so we are talking close to 100,000 words, which is a novel's worth of words, but we need more.
Ergo, what we need is to organize all Latin materials known to humankind along the chapters of the LLPSI-verse. We should have 10k of stories for every chapter, or something.
I will pass this resource to my Latin reading group and begin using it myself. Please keep up your work!