I. Octubre
, : “ . , , . . , ; , . , ; ”.
A school-year diary from Turin, for B2
Heart Corazón
Edmondo De Amicis, 1925
A complete Spanish translation (the translator is not named in this edition) of Edmondo De Amicis’s Italian Cuore (1886), from the 1925 edition of the Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico; not an adaptation. In the catalog it is B2: about 84,700 words and 19 words per sentence on average. Ten months of a school year, October to July, told in the dated diary entries of Enrique, a boy in Turin, with nine monthly stories read in class, such as “El pequeño patriota paduano” and “De los Apeninos a los Andes”.
- B2
- 84 681 words
- 14-24 hours
Will this text hold?
B1
Earlier
At B1 the long sentences of the entries, strung together with commas and quotations, will slow you down, as will older forms like dió and fué and imperatives such as Quered and Tratadlo.
B1B2
This text
You can manage it at B2: the vocabulary is everyday (school, family, street), most entries are short, and you can read a few a day, translating single words and old forms.
Check this passageC1
With room to spare
At C1 the diary reads freely; only the monthly stories and the teacher’s speeches, with their long periods, ask for a second look.
Start readingThe average sentence has 19 words, and one word in thirteen has 9 letters or more (7.6%). Sentences are longest in the October entries (about 23 words) and shortest in May (about 16). The vocabulary is everyday, school, family and street, but the long, comma-linked sentences of a 1925 translation, with imperatives in -d (Quered, Tratadlo) and forms like dió and fué, ask for B2 stamina. Among the catalog’s complete Spanish texts it sits mid-range, between Doña Perfecta (15 words per sentence) and Pepita Jiménez (22), and its share of long words is below the 9.9% where the catalog starts C1. Hence B2. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 84 681
- words
- 19
- words in an average sentence
- 14-24
- hours of reading
- 1925
- Secretaría de Educación Pública
Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1925. Project Gutenberg
What it is about, without the ending
Enrique, a boy in the third year of elementary school in Turin, begins the school year with a diary. Each entry is dated and short: the first day, his teacher, and the classmates he gets to know, among them Deroso, the top pupil, Garrón, Coreta and Franti, and a new boy from Calabria whom the class welcomes as a brother. His father and mother add letters and notes to his entries, and each month the teacher reads a story aloud. How the school year ends, with the exams and the farewell, is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Corazón
V. Febrero
, . ¡ ! , , , ; ¡ ! , , ¡ !, , , , , , , ¡ !: .
Choose an underlined word.
Imperatives with -d
Quered bien, Tratadlo and hacedle are the vosotros imperatives of this 1925 translation: the teacher speaks to the whole class with the -d ending (quered, tratad, haced) and attaches the pronoun to it, so Tratadlo means “treat him”. Dió, without an accent, is today’s dio. Os debéis alegrar puts the pronoun first and means “you should be glad”.
Exclamations inside a sentence
The long sentence after “¡Pobre gente!” is built from short pieces. Commas and exclamations jump from the performers running about to the cold and to the meals eaten on their feet. ¡Adiós espectáculo! is the narrator’s comment, “goodbye, show”: an exclamation with no verb dropped into the sentence. Se les llama saltimbanquis is impersonal: “they are called”, the way people call them.
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
In the entry “El payasillo” one sentence strings clauses and exclamations together: “Todo el día están corriendo del circo a los coches, en traje de punto, ¡y con el frío que hace!, comen dos bocados a escape”. Translating the whole sentence in Reader shows where the pieces break.
ReaderIf this book is not the one
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Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
It is the complete text, not an adaptation: a full Spanish translation of Edmondo De Amicis’s Italian Cuore (1886). The translator is not named in this edition. The text follows the 1925 edition of the Secretaría de Educación Pública (Mexico), from Project Gutenberg, from the first diary entry in October to the last in July; the prologue and the author’s note that open the printed book are left out.
Is there an audiobook?
Heart has no audiobook on MovaReader: here the book is read on screen. The translation appears when you tap a word, and you will need it most for older words of everyday life, such as rorro or saltimbanquis.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. Entries like “El payasillo” string clauses and exclamations in one breath, for example “Todo el día están corriendo del circo a los coches, en traje de punto, ¡y con el frío que hace!, comen dos bocados a escape”. Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
The whole book takes about 14-24 hours: the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker’s. It is split into ten months, from about 2,700 words (July) to about 16,000 (May), and each month is made of short dated entries, so a few entries make an evening.
Where does the text get easier?
It stays even rather than getting easier. Sentences shorten a little as the year goes on, from about 23 words in October to about 16 in May, but long words become more frequent, from 6.7% in October to 8.3% in May and 8.7% in June, so the last months are not lighter.
Will my place in the book be saved?
Yes. Once you sign in, the reader keeps your last place and the words you opened, so you can return to the diary each evening where you left off. Any of the ten months also opens from the contents on this page, for example February or June.