Jacob Grimm · 1785
5–8 unknown words per 100 at CET-4 level. Looking each one up will stall you; this one wants glosses that appear in place.
Coverage = the share of words in the text you already know. The research gives two lines: 98% before independent fluent reading is realistic, 95% for the instructional level that needs support (Hu & Nation, 2000). Proper nouns are not counted as unknown — recognising that it is a name is enough; this book has 140 of them.
CET-6 and up, or read it with glosses. 101,112 words in total; at 150 words a minute for a non-native reader, about 11 h 14 min to finish. Average sentence length 22.3 words — on the long side, so the load comes from sentence structure as much as from vocabulary. Reaching 95% coverage on this book (the floor for readability) takes roughly 11,500 word families.
The opening of Grimms' Fairy Tales, word for word. Tap any word you don't know and its meaning here appears beside it — no sign-up, tap as often as you like.
A certain king had a beautiful garden, and in the garden stood a tree which bore golden apples. These apples were always counted, and about the time when they began to grow ripe it was found that every night one of them was gone. The king became very angry at this, and ordered the gardener to keep watch all night under the tree. The gardener set his eldest son to watch; but about twelve o’clock he fell asleep, and in the morning another of the apples was missing. Then the second son was ordered to watch; and at midnight he too fell asleep, and in the morning another apple was gone. Then the third son offered to keep watch; but the gardener at first would not let him, for fear some harm should come to him: however, at last he consented, and the young man laid himself under the tree to watch. As the clock struck twelve he heard a rustling noise in the air, and a bird came flying that was of pure gold; and as it was snapping at one of the apples with its beak, the gardener’s son jumped up and shot an arrow at it. But the arrow did the bird no harm; only it dropped a golden feather from its tail, and then flew away. The golden feather was brought to the king in the morning, and all the council was called together. Everyone agreed that it was worth more than all the wealth of the kingdom: but the king said, ‘One feather is of no use to me, I must have the whole bird.’
👆 Tap any word to try it
The numbers above are computed, but we haven't cut Grimms' Fairy Tales into passages yet.
If you have the ebook, upload it — ready in a few minutes, same three-minute passages, same tap-a-word glosses. Free, no card needed.
These are already built, and closest in difficulty to Grimms' Fairy Tales.
Ordered by unknown words per 100. Lower reads easier; to step up a level, pick a higher number.
Computed by Readii from the public-domain text (updated 2026-10-21), not estimated by hand. The Readii reading level is our own scale, anchored on unknown-word density; it is not the same system as Lexile or AR and does not convert directly. Unknown words are measured against the CET-4 ∪ Gaokao lists, so this is difficulty for a Chinese-speaking learner, not a native-child reading level.