I. La caperuza roja
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A Brothers Grimm tale retold for A1
Little Red Riding Hood Caperucita Roja
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
This is a retelling of the Brothers Grimm tale in simple Spanish, not the original text: a MovaReader adaptation for readers who are just starting to read in Spanish. In the catalog it is A1: about 3,300 words told in the present tense, with sentences of 6 words on average. 8 short chapters about a girl in a red velvet hood who carries cake and wine through the woods to her sick grandmother and meets a wolf on the way.
- A1
- 3 313 words
- 1 hour
Will this text hold?
A1
This text
You can manage it at A1: sentences are short, the story stays in the present tense, and words like terciopelo or bebedero translate with a tap.
Check this passageA2
With room to spare
At A2 the tale reads almost without translation: good for building speed and getting used to longer reading in Spanish.
Start readingThe average sentence has 6 words: the story moves in short present-tense statements, and about a third of the words are the characters’ lines in quotation marks. A word of 9 letters or more comes up about once in 55 words, and 49 of those 60 long words are the name Caperucita itself. The difficulty is even: each of the 8 chapters has 6-7 words per sentence. Full texts in Spanish start at B2 in the catalog: Unamuno’s Mist has 13 words per sentence and one long word in fourteen. Hence A1. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 3 313
- words
- 6
- words in an average sentence
- 1
- hour of reading
MovaReader. Project Gutenberg
What it is about, without the ending
A village girl loves the red velvet hood her grandmother gave her so much that everyone calls her Little Red Riding Hood. One morning her mother gives her cake and a bottle of wine for her sick grandmother, who lives alone in the woods, and asks her to walk carefully and stay on the path. In the woods the girl meets a wolf: he is friendly, asks where she is going and suggests she look at the flowers. What happens next at grandmother’s house is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Caperucita Roja
VI. Una abuela muy rara
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Choose an underlined word.
Where the name Caperucita comes from
Caperuza means hood, and the text explains the word itself: Una caperuza es como un gorro. The suffix -ita makes a word small and affectionate, and z turns into c before i: caperuza becomes Caperucita, “little hood”. Te queda muy bien: “it suits you very well”, from quedar bien. La lleva: “she wears it”, where la stands for la caperuza.
What big ears
The dialogue rests on two patterns. Qué orejas tan grandes tienes: qué, a noun, tan and an adjective make “what big ears you have”. Son para oírte mejor: para with an infinitive gives the purpose, “the better to hear you”. The pronoun te is added to the end of the infinitive: oír and te make oírte, ver and te make verte, and the same goes for abrazarte and comerte.
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 simple words add up to an unfamiliar phrase, as in Te queda muy bien, “it suits you very well”.
ReaderIf this book is not the one
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Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
An adaptation, not the original text. It is MovaReader’s own retelling in simple Spanish of the Brothers Grimm tale Rotkäppchen from the first volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 1812. The language and length have changed: the present tense, 6 words per sentence on average, and a few scenes opened up into short conversations, so the 8 chapters, about 3,300 words, run more than twice the length of the tale itself. The episodes of the source remain: the velvet hood from grandmother, mother’s warning not to leave the path, the flowers in the woods, the questions about big ears and eyes, and the lesser-known second part in which Little Red Riding Hood takes cakes to her grandmother again. The full text of the tale is not in the catalog.
Is there an audiobook?
No, there is no audio version of this tale on MovaReader; the text is read on screen. Tap an unfamiliar word and its translation appears: here that will mostly be words such as terciopelo (velvet) or bebedero (drinking trough).
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes: whole-sentence translation comes with the Reader plan. But sentences in this tale average 6 words, so you will rarely need a whole one translated: mostly lines like Son para oírte mejor or ¡Qué caperuza tan bonita llevas!, where the words are simple but the pattern is not. 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 tale: the pace of someone who still translates new words, not a native speaker’s. There are 8 chapters of roughly 300 to 600 words each, so a chapter is easy to read in one sitting.
Where does the text get easier?
The difficulty is even from start to finish: each of the 8 chapters averages 6-7 words per sentence. Only chapter I, which describes the village and grandmother’s house, runs slightly longer at about 7; after that there is more dialogue and about 6.
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, “Las flores del bosque”.