Мальчики — The Boys
Volodya comes home for the holidays with a mysterious friend. The escape to America is set for tomorrow.
Source trail: compare the public-domain Russian text in Russian Wikisource. The reader's text has been proofread and divided into learnable sentences; it is not simplified.
How long «Мальчики» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 1791 running words · 179 sentences · about 7 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 20 minutes at a learner's pace with the glosses to hand — not a native's pace, which would be a third of that |
| Different words | 696 dictionary words, averaging 10.0 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 461 of them — 66%. A word met once is a word you will not learn from this text, which is why length alone does not say how hard a story is (the arithmetic) |
| Difficulty | level 2 of 3 on this shelf · 9 of 15 by length |
How much of it you would already understand
Each row is the most common words in these fifteen books, in order of how much Russian they open, measured against Мальчики itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 64.5% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 72.1% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 81.2% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 88.7% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 96.8% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 607 of this story's own 696 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 338 carry 80%. Ninety-five per cent is the coverage at which reading stops being decoding, though the threshold is softer than it is usually quoted: how that number is arrived at.
Shorter and longer on the same shelf
Ванька — 1153 words, freeСпать хочется — 1570 words После бала — 3075 wordsДама с собачкой — 5109 words
How it begins
— Володя приехал!
“Volodya has arrived!”
That first sentence is the free sample, and honestly the only one: «Мальчики» is part of the full library — all fifteen texts, every word glossed, sentence-by-sentence English and audio — for €5 a month, cancel whenever you like. What the library costs. Seven complete Chekhov stories are free in the reader, no account, if you would rather taste the room first.
More like this: all fifteen stories, or the numbers behind them — how much Russian you need to read Chekhov.