Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche · 1844
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 372 of them.
Advanced — read it with glosses. 111,927 words in total; at 150 words a minute for a non-native reader, about 12 h 26 min to finish. Average sentence length 15.4 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 Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, 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.
“Zarathustra” is my brother’s most personal work; it is the history of his most individual experiences, of his friendships, ideals, raptures, bitterest disappointments and sorrows. Above it all, however, there soars, transfiguring it, the image of his greatest hopes and remotest aims. My brother had the figure of Zarathustra in his mind from his very earliest youth: he once told me that even as a child he had dreamt of him. At different periods in his life, he would call this haunter of his dreams by different names; “but in the end,” he declares in a note on the subject, “I had to do a PERSIAN the honour of identifying him with this creature of my fancy. Persians were the first to take a broad and comprehensive view of history. Every series of evolutions, according to them, was presided over by a prophet; and every prophet had his ‘Hazar,’—his dynasty of a thousand years.”
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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.