the-coding-interview VS chinese-comprehension

12.The Coding Interview

I'm not quite sure if it counts as easy, but this tool here (https://github.com/Destaq/chinese-comprehension) works really well if you're comfortable with a bit of playing around with things on your computer (I found the instructions reasonably clear, but I've done a bit of coding before). This works really well for files, and I use it to estimate the number of unique characters/word in a book as well as the total character count.

Not sure what an extensive text looks like? This Hacking Chinese post answers that well. As for finding such texts: you can estimate the difficulty of some text with this tool I made (technical but allows personalized difficulty) or this online one (accessible to non-coders but you’ll have to estimate difficulty off of the general stats for a text). A list of novels graded by difficulty (with more than just various editions of 《三体》and 《活着》, hold in your astonishment) can be found on Heavenly Path here.

this script by reddit user 'LAcuber', will process a document and give you an approximate count of unique words/characters, breakdown by HSK level, and if you also feed it a list of your known vocab, it will tell you what portion of the text might be unknown to you. After you consume a text, you can run the script again, and tell it to add all previously new words to your known vocab list.

A lot of learners use Chinese Text Analyzer, a paid (~$20 USD) piece of software that will scan some text and spit out % known words, number of chars/words, most common unknown words, HSK distribution etc. I tried the 14-day free trial, and while useful, its price tag kept me off. So, I developed a free tool with a server member called chinese-comprehension that does the exact same thing, albeit shown on as words not as graphics. While you will need to have Python installed, this is fairly straightforward.