What is the Oborneva adaptation?

Maria Oborneva re-derived the Flesch Reading Ease constants for Russian in 2006 using large parallel corpora. The Russian formula is 206.835 minus 1.3 times words-per-sentence minus 60.1 times syllables-per-word, replacing the English 1.015 and 84.6 constants.

How are syllables counted in Russian?

In Russian the number of syllables in a word equals the number of vowels, since every syllable has exactly one vowel nucleus. The tool counts the vowels а е ё и о у ы э ю я, which gives an exact syllable count without estimation.

What do the score bands mean?

Roughly: 80 and above is very easy, 60 to 80 easy, 40 to 60 medium, 20 to 40 difficult, and below 20 very difficult. Higher is easier, the same direction as the original English Flesch scale.

Why does my score differ from an English Flesch tool?

Because the constants differ. Russian words carry more syllables on average, so applying the English 84.6 syllable penalty would unfairly depress every Russian score. Oborneva's 60.1 corrects for this, giving comparable difficulty bands.

Is my text sent anywhere?

No. The whole calculation runs in your browser in JavaScript. Your text is never uploaded or stored, so it is safe for unpublished or sensitive documents.

Russian Flesch Readability Adaptation

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Readability formulas designed for English do not transfer directly to Russian, because Russian words are longer and more syllable-dense. This tool uses the Oborneva (2006) adaptation of the Flesch Reading Ease score, which recalibrates the formula for Russian so the difficulty bands stay meaningful.

How it works

The score is computed as:

206.835 − 1.3 × (words / sentences) − 60.1 × (syllables / words)

Words are Cyrillic tokens, sentences are counted from terminal punctuation (. ! ? …), and syllables are counted exactly: in Russian every vowel forms one syllable, so the tool simply counts the vowels а е ё и о у ы э ю я in each word. The result is clamped to a 0-100 display range and mapped to a difficulty band, where a higher number means easier reading.

Example

Short sentences with common, low-syllable words score high (easy), while long sentences packed with multi-syllable bureaucratic vocabulary score low. Because the syllable count is exact rather than estimated, the score is stable and reproducible for the same text.

Notes

Use this to compare drafts, tune content for a target audience, or check that educational or public-facing Russian copy is not unintentionally dense. Pair it with the Russian LIX score for a second, syllable-independent opinion.