John Buchan · 1875
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 397 of them.
Advanced — read it with glosses. 41,072 words in total; at 150 words a minute for a non-native reader, about 4 h 34 min to finish. Average sentence length 15.6 words. Reaching 95% coverage on this book (the floor for readability) takes roughly 19,500 word families.
The opening of The Thirty-Nine Steps, 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.
I returned from the City about three o’clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life. I had been three months in the Old Country, and was fed up with it. If anyone had told me a year ago that I would have been feeling like that I should have laughed at him; but there was the fact. The weather made me liverish, the talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick. I couldn’t get enough exercise, and the amusements of London seemed as flat as soda-water that has been standing in the sun. “Richard Hannay,” I kept telling myself, “you have got into the wrong ditch, my friend, and you had better climb out.”
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The numbers above are computed, but we haven't cut The Thirty-Nine Steps into passages yet.
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These are already built, and closest in difficulty to The Thirty-Nine Steps.
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.