Stephen Crane · 1871
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 109 of them.
Advanced — read it with glosses. 46,266 words in total; at 150 words a minute for a non-native reader, about 5 h 8 min to finish. Average sentence length 12.6 words — short sentences, brisk pace. 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 The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War, 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.
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army’s feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills.
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These are already built, and closest in difficulty to The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War.
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.