Первая любовь — First Love
Sixteen years old, a dacha outside Moscow, a princess next door — and the discovery of who she really loves.
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 «Первая любовь» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 15781 running words · 1285 sentences · about 63 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 175 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 | 3216 dictionary words, averaging 12.3 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 1822 of them — 57%. 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 3 of 3 on this shelf · 14 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 Первая любовь itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 65.8% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 75.5% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 81.8% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 89.1% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 95.6% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 2427 of this story's own 3216 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 779 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
Нос — 7645 wordsШинель — 10007 words Белые ночи — 16861 words
How it begins
Гости давно разъехались.
The guests had long since departed.
That first sentence is the free sample, and honestly the only one: «Первая любовь» 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.