I. El molino, el burro y el gato
. .
:
« , . , . ».
«¿ , ? ».
« . . ».
«¿ ? ¿ ?».
«, . . , : , ».
An adaptation of Perrault for A1
Puss in Boots El gato con botas
Charles Perrault
This is not Perrault’s own text but a retelling in simple Spanish that MovaReader wrote for level A1 from his fairy tale “Puss in Boots” (1697). Its roughly 3,900 words fall into sentences of 7 words on average, and the whole story unfolds in the present tense. Across 8 chapters, a miller’s youngest son inherits nothing but a cat, and the cat asks him for a sack and a pair of boots and promises that this inheritance will prove its worth.
- A1
- 3 893 words
- 1 hour
Will this text hold?
A1
This text
An A1 reader can manage it: sentences average 7 words, the story stays in the present tense, and the line ¡Del marqués de Carabás! comes back again and again, so a chapter reads in one sitting, translating the odd word.
Check this passageA2
With room to spare
An A2 reader will rarely need a translation here, except for words such as manguito, perdices or picadillo.
Start readingWith 7 words to a sentence, it has one more than The Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood (6 each) and clearly fewer than the Don Quixote adaptation (10), which sits at A2. Only 12 words in the whole text have 9 letters or more, about one in 320, and half of them are picadillo and imposible, three times each; in the Don Quixote adaptation such a word comes about every 36th word, and in Unamuno’s Mist, where B2 begins, every 14th. The story is told in the present tense, the characters speak in simple commands (Dame un saco, Siéntate, suba usted), and lines and thoughts in quotation marks make up over a quarter of the text. From chapter to chapter the difficulty barely moves: chapter IV has the shortest sentences (6 words on average) and chapter VIII the longest (7). So the tale sits at A1. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 3 893
- words
- 7
- words in an average sentence
- 1
- hour of reading
MovaReader. Project Gutenberg
What it is about, without the ending
An old miller dies and leaves his three sons a mill, a donkey and a cat. The elder two take the mill and the donkey; the youngest gets only the cat and is already thinking of making a muff from its fur. But the cat speaks up, asks for a sack and a pair of boots, then catches a rabbit and two partridges and carries them to the king as gifts from the Marquis of Carabas, a lord he has made up himself. When the king and his daughter take a carriage ride along the river, the cat tells his master to get into the water, then runs ahead of the carriage and orders the mowers and reapers to tell the king whose land this is. In truth it all belongs to a rich ogre whose castle stands at the end of the road. What the cat has in mind next is left for the book itself.
Compare two places
El gato con botas
VI. Las tierras del marqués
. . . .
. . .
« », , « . . : “¿ ?”. : “ ”».
, .
« , . ¡ ! , ».
Choose an underlined word.
The cat asks and gives orders
Hace como que no oye nada means “he pretends not to hear anything”. Then the cat speaks in commands: in Dame and cómprame the pronoun me, “me”, is attached to the end of the verb, while a negative command takes a different form: No estés triste, “don’t be sad”, no me comas, “don’t eat me”. Me tienes a mí translates as “you have me”. Ya vas a ver: ir a with an infinitive talks about the future, “you’ll see”.
The cat speaks to the mowers
The cat addresses several people politely, as ustedes, so the verbs end in -en: escuchen, “listen”, ustedes tienen que decir, “you have to say”. Va a preguntar: ir a with an infinitive, “he is going to ask”. In Y si no lo dicen, los hago picadillo the present tense points to the future: “if you don’t say it, I’ll make mincemeat of you”. The quotation marks “…” inside «…» mark someone else’s words within a line: the king’s question and the answer the cat demands.
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
At A1 many words are new, so Reader lifts the daily limit on translating them and translates whole sentences, such as the cat’s promise Si haces lo que yo digo, tu fortuna está hecha, where simple words together mean more than each one alone.
ReaderIf this book is not the one
All books at this level
Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
The text is MovaReader’s own adaptation, so the words are not Perrault’s. The source is Charles Perrault’s fairy tale “The Master Cat, or Puss in Boots” (Le Maître chat ou le Chat botté) from Histoires ou contes du temps passé, published in 1697 and known in English as Tales of Mother Goose. Above all, the language is different: the tale is retold in Spanish in the present tense, with short sentences and common words, and the two rhymed morals that close Perrault’s tale are left out. The retelling is more than twice as long as Perrault’s tale, with dialogue and scenes that grow out of the plot, such as buying the boots from a shoemaker. Perrault’s episodes keep his order: the inheritance, the rabbit and partridges for the king, the bath in the river, the mowers and reapers along the road and the ogre in his castle.
Is there an audiobook?
There is no audiobook or narration of this adaptation on MovaReader, so the tale is read rather than heard. What you can do is tap an unfamiliar word for its translation; here that will often be a word like perdices, carroza or molinero.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, as long as you are on the Reader plan. Sentences here average only 7 words, so you will want sentence translation less for length than for turns of phrase whose meaning does not add up word by word, like hace como que no oye nada or se pone rojo como un tomate. Single words translate on the free plan too, within a daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
Allow about an hour if you stop to translate unfamiliar words; a native speaker’s pace is not the measure here. The chapters run from about 360 to 560 words, so each takes a few minutes and the whole tale fits into one evening.
Where does the text get easier?
There is no easier stretch, because the difficulty is even from the first chapter to the last. The shortest sentences are in chapter IV, about the bath in the river, the longest in chapter VIII, and the gap between them is about a word and a half. Chapter VI, where the cat threatens the mowers, has the most long words: picadillo alone appears there three times.
Will my place in the book be saved?
Yes, once you sign in, the reader keeps your place and the words you translated, so you can come back to the tale the next day. Any of the 8 chapters also opens from the contents on this page, for instance chapter III, where the name of the Marquis of Carabas is heard for the first time.