Спать хочется — Sleepy
A thirteen-year-old nursemaid rocks somebody else's baby, night after sleepless night. One of the most frightening things Chekhov wrote.
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 «Спать хочется» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 1570 running words · 169 sentences · about 6 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 17 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 | 611 dictionary words, averaging 9.3 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 395 of them — 65%. 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 · 8 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 Спать хочется itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 61.4% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 68.8% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 76.5% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 88.2% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 96.5% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 533 of this story's own 611 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 297 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
Студент — 1124 words, freeВанька — 1153 words, free Мальчики — 1791 wordsПосле бала — 3075 words
How it begins
Ночь.
Night.
That first sentence is the free sample, and honestly the only one: «Спать хочется» 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.