II. Чоботи
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A sad Kyiv fairy tale, retold for A1
Nine Brothers and Their Sister Halia Дев’ять братів і десята сестриця Галя
Marko Vovchok
This is not Marko Vovchok’s original text but MovaReader’s own retelling, in simple Ukrainian, of her literary fairy tale Дев’ять братів і десята сестриця Галя (Nine Brothers and Their Sister Halia), first printed in 1863. It is for readers who are just starting Ukrainian and want a real story rather than a children’s fable: about 4,000 words in 10 short chapters, told in the present tense, with 5 words per sentence on average and dialogue in more than half of the paragraphs.
- A1
- 3 961 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 dialogue repeats itself, as in the eldest son’s Добре, мамо (“All right, Mum”), and the widow’s Дніпро шумить, дерева шелестять (“the Dnipro roars, the trees rustle”) comes back as a refrain until you read it without a tap.
Check this passageA2
With room to spare
At A2 the tale reads almost without translation; then try Marko Vovchok’s Наймичка (The Servant Girl), which the catalogue has as an A2 adaptation told in the past tense.
Start readingThe average sentence has 5 words (5.3 before rounding), and 161 of the 300 paragraphs are lines of dialogue. The narration stays in the present tense; past forms such as вигнав (drove out), засумував (grew sad) and кинув (threw down) appear mostly in the mother’s story about Lasun in chapter V. Words of 9 letters or more make up 2.6% of the text, between Котик і Півник та інші казки (The Cat and the Rooster and Other Tales) at 1.7% and Lesya Ukrainka’s Біда навчить та інші казки (Trouble Teaches and Other Tales) at 3.8%, while the A2 retelling of Marko Vovchok’s Наймичка (The Servant Girl) already has 9-10 words per sentence and the past tense throughout. Her complete Інститутка (The Boarding School Girl) is B2, with 7.8% long words. Hence A1. This is the catalogue’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 3 961
- words
- 5
- words in an average sentence
- 1
- hour of reading
MovaReader. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
A poor widow lives in a small old hut on a meadow below Kyiv, between the noisy city and the Dnipro, with nine sons and a little daughter, Halia, who loves the youngest brother most of all. The family has one pair of old boots, a pot of millet porridge on good days and no money for anything at the fair. The eldest son goes into service and comes home beaten; later two brothers lose their jobs to a proud melon grower and a proud farmer’s daughter. One night the nine brothers leave to seek their fortune, and the widow and Halia wait for years, hearing their steps in every sound of the river. Grown up and alone, Halia meets a young Cossack, Mykhailo Narada, who stops at her window to ask the way. They marry and set off by ox cart for his village, along a road where people say robbers attack travellers. What happens next is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Дев’ять братів і десята сестриця Галя
V. Шлях у горах
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Choose an underlined word.
Young ones end in -ята
Ukrainian names the young of animals with -я, plural -ята: голуб (dove) gives голуб’я, голуб’ята, just as теля (calf) and курчата (chicks). A mother calls her children голуб’ята, “little doves”; the same suffix appears in дівчата (girls) and хлоп’ята (little boys).
Past and present in one story
The mother tells Lasun’s story in the past tense, лишився (stayed), засумував (grew sad), згадав (remembered), and then slips into the present, просить (asks), дають (they give), as storytellers do to make a scene vivid. Masculine past forms end in -в or -вся, so these verbs are easy to spot.
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 every word is easy but the meaning is not, as in the old woman’s Ти ще скажеш, що на вербі ростуть груші! (“Next you’ll tell me pears grow on a willow!”), a Ukrainian way of saying “that will never happen”.
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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 Marko Vovchok’s literary fairy tale Дев’ять братів і десята сестриця Галя. It first appeared in 1863 in her own Russian version, in the St Petersburg magazine Biblioteka dlya chteniya, and the Ukrainian text was first printed in 1865, in the collection Оповідання Марка Вовчка. We read it on Ukrainian Wikisource in the New York edition of 1920 (Ruska Knyharnia), printed in the old Zhelekhivka spelling. What changed: a text of about 14,000 words with long, ornate sentences and many diminutives became about 4,000 words of short sentences in the present tense; long descriptions of the city, the church, the fair and the cliffs are shortened, and some scenes are told in fewer lines. The plot, the characters and their names (Lasun, Mykhailo Narada, the village of Hlybove), the order of events and the ending remain.
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 a poor 19th-century household, such as наймит (a hired farmhand) or куліш (a thin millet porridge), or гава, literally a crow, the night bogey little Halia is afraid of.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes: whole-sentence translation comes with the Reader plan. Sentences here average 5 words, so you will need it less for their length than for idioms such as Хоч лягай і вмирай! (“I might as well lie down and die!”), where four easy words make a set phrase of despair. 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 10 chapters run from about 170 words (chapter IX, the cave above the Dnipro) to about 640 (chapter X, the road), and most are 350-480 words, one short sitting each.
Where does the text get easier?
The difficulty is even. Chapter V, where the mother tells the story of Lasun and the robbers’ cave, has the longest sentences (6.8 words on average) and most of the past tense; chapter IX has the shortest (4.9). Long words stay at 2.6% for the whole book, so no chapter brings a wall of new vocabulary.
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 10 chapters directly, for example chapter VIII, Козак під вікном (The Cossack at the Window).