Victor Hugo · 1802
Well beyond the comfort zone at CET-4 level. If you want it anyway, start by accepting that you will not follow every sentence.
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 3,272 of them.
Advanced — read it with glosses. 567,924 words in total; at 150 words a minute for a non-native reader, about 63 h 6 min to finish. Average sentence length 15.9 words. This book is heavy on rare, archaic and invented words: even 25,000 high-frequency word families will not reach 95% coverage — its difficulty is not in the common vocabulary.
The opening of Les Misérables, 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.
In 1815, M. Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—— He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D—— since 1806.
Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the very moment when he arrived in the diocese. True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do. M. Myriel was the son of a councillor of the Parliament of Aix; hence he belonged to the nobility of the bar. It was said that his father, destining him to be the heir of his own post, had married him at a very early age, eighteen or twenty, in accordance with a custom which is rather widely prevalent in parliamentary families. In spite of this marriage, however, it was said that Charles Myriel created a great deal of talk. He was well formed, though rather short in stature, elegant, graceful, intelligent; the whole of the first portion of his life had been devoted to the world and to gallantry.
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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.