Detailed Information

ZIX is a lightweight Python package that gives you a pragmatic score for how understandable a German text is. Install it with pip, pass any German text to get_zix(), and you get back a numeric score along with an approximate CEFR language level (from A1, very easy, to C2, very difficult) via get_cefr(). Under the hood, the score combines sentence length, established readability metrics, and vocabulary overlap with standard CEFR word lists, going beyond pure readability to capture how understandable a text actually is. Everything runs locally and offline — no API keys, external services, or network calls are needed at runtime, since the trained model, scaler, and reference vocabularies ship directly with the package. This makes it easy to drop into your own pipelines, for example to automatically flag overly complex text or to measure whether a rewritten version has actually become easier to understand. Note that the index is designed for German-language paragraphs and works best on full sentences rather than single words or short phrases. It's intended as a practical, directional signal rather than an exact or official CEFR measurement, and the maintainers recommend validating it against your own text data before relying on it in production.