I. Горобець
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Three tales for children, retold for A1
Trouble Teaches and Other Tales Біда навчить та інші казки
Lesya Ukrainka
This is not Lesya Ukrainka’s original text but MovaReader’s own retelling, in simple Ukrainian, of three prose tales she wrote for children around 1890: Біда навчить (Trouble Teaches), about a foolish young sparrow, Метелик (The Moth), and Лелія (The Lily), a sick boy’s night flight with the queen of the flower elves. It is for readers who are just starting Ukrainian: about 3,900 words in 8 short chapters, told in the present tense, with 6 words per sentence on average and plenty of dialogue.
- A1
- 3 929 words
- 1 hour
Will this text hold?
A1
This text
You can manage it at A1 if you know the present tense and a few hundred everyday words: the sparrow puts the same request, Навчіть мене розуму! (“Teach me some sense!”), to seven birds in turn, so by the third time you read it without a tap.
Check this passageA2
With room to spare
At A2 the tales read almost without translation: a quick warm-up before Lesya Ukrainka’s Лісова пісня (The Forest Song), which the catalogue has as a B1 adaptation.
Start readingThe average sentence has 6 words (5.6 before rounding), and 117 of the 245 paragraphs are lines of dialogue. The narration stays in the present tense; past forms such as навчила (taught) or зрізали (cut off) turn up only in a few lines. Words of 9 letters or more make up 3.8% of the text, close to the 3.6% of Рукавичка та інші казки (The Mitten and Other Tales), the catalogue’s other A1 book of tales, while A2 retellings such as Наймичка (The Servant Girl) already have 9-10 words per sentence. Complete Ukrainian texts in the catalogue start at B2: Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s Intermezzo has 6.3% long words. The difficulty is even: chapter II, where the sparrow goes from bird to bird with short questions, averages 4.5 words per sentence, and chapter VI, in a lord’s garden, 6.2. Hence A1. This is the catalogue’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 3 929
- words
- 6
- words in an average sentence
- 1
- hour of reading
MovaReader. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
A young sparrow is quick to fight but has no sense at all: while he quarrels with a friend over three hemp seeds, a hen eats them, and he sets off to ask the hen, a cuckoo, a stork, a crow, an owl, a magpie and a raven to teach him wisdom. A grey night moth lives in a damp cellar behind a barrel of sauerkraut, next to a gloomy bat, and dreams of the light it has never seen. And Pavlus, a sick boy who cannot sleep, is visited by Lelia, the queen of the elves who live in flowers: she turns him into a poppy and carries him to a lord’s garden, to a big city and to a poor village girl’s flowerbed. What happens next is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Біда навчить та інші казки
VI. Панський сад
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Choose an underlined word.
Diminutives everywhere
Ukrainian tales for children are full of diminutives: зернятка (little seeds) from зерно, курчатка (little chicks) from курчата, серденько (sweetheart) from серце. Once you have tapped a diminutive, look for the plain root inside it, and the next one will not stop you.
They without a subject
The lilies complain with plural verbs and no subject: скільки нас тоді зрізали means “how many of us they cut then”, with an unnamed “they”, like English “they say”. Зрізали is the past tense of зрізати, a prefixed form of різати, whose present you see in ріжуть.
Chapters
Translation while you read
The book stays free on every plan. Reader, €1 a month, removes the daily limit on words and sentences.
Reader
€1 a month
Reader translates the whole sentence where easy words make a proverb, as in the owl’s Хто дурним народився, той дурним і помре, “whoever is born a fool will die a fool”.
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Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
An adaptation, not an original text. It is MovaReader’s own retelling in simple modern Ukrainian of three prose tales Lesya Ukrainka wrote for children: Біда навчить (Trouble Teaches), first printed in the Lviv children’s magazine Дзвінок in 1891; Метелик (The Moth), printed in Дзвінок in 1890; and Лелія (The Lily), printed in 1891 in the series Ілюстрована бібліотека для молодіжі, міщан і селян. All three were read on Ukrainian Wikisource, which gives them from the 12-volume collected works (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 1976, vol. 7) in the text of the first printings; the selection and order of the tales are the catalogue’s own. What changed: everything is told in the present tense in short sentences; regional words became standard ones (the stork is лелека rather than бузько, the bat кажан rather than лилик); the rhymed laments of the lilies are simplified, the spring song the village girl sings is left out, and long descriptions such as the artificial-flower workshop are shortened. The plots, the characters and the morals remain. The source texts themselves are not in the catalogue.
Is there an audiobook?
No, there is no audio version on MovaReader; the text is read on screen. Tap an unfamiliar word and its translation appears: here that will often be words of the woods and the house, such as дупло (the hollow in a tree where the owl lives) or льох (cellar).
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes: whole-sentence translation comes with the Reader plan. Sentences here average 6 words, so you will need it less for their length than for proverbs such as the raven’s Поки біди не знатимеш, розуму не матимеш (“until you know trouble, you will not have sense”), where the future forms знатимеш and матимеш hide two easy verbs. Without the plan you can translate single words until the daily limit runs out.
How many hours does it take?
About an hour for the whole book, at the pace of someone who still translates new words, not a native speaker’s. The 8 chapters run from about 350 to 660 words: the sparrow’s tale fills chapters I-III, the moth chapter IV and the lily chapters V-VIII, so the first two tales fit in one sitting.
Where does the text get easier?
The difficulty is even. Chapter II, where the sparrow goes from bird to bird with short questions, has the shortest sentences (4.5 words on average); chapter VI, in the lord’s garden, has the longest (6.2). The last chapter has the most long words, 5.0% against 3.8% for the whole book, because of diminutives such as сестричка (little sister) and молоденька (very young).
Will my place in the book be saved?
Yes. After you sign in, the reader remembers where you stopped and which words you opened. The contents on this page also open any of the 8 chapters directly, for example chapter IV, Метелик.