I. La casa cerca del bosque
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A Grimm tale in very short sentences
The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats El lobo y los siete cabritillos
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 3,500 words told in the present tense, with sentences of 5 words on average. 8 short chapters about a mother goat, her seven kids and a wolf who tries one trick after another to get through their door.
- A1
- 3 515 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 tiza or molinero 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 reading longer texts in Spanish.
Start readingThe average sentence has 5 words, the shortest among the catalog’s Spanish books: the other A1 tales have 6-7. The story is told in the present tense, and about a quarter of the words are the characters’ lines in quotation marks. A word of 9 letters or more comes up about once in 160 words: there are 22 in the whole text, and the most frequent is palangana (washbasin), three times. The difficulty is even: each of the 8 chapters averages 5-6 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.
- 3 515
- words
- 5
- words in an average sentence
- 1
- hour of reading
MovaReader. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
A mother goat lives with her seven kids in a small wooden house near the woods. One day she has to go into the forest for food, and before she leaves she warns them about the wolf: they will know him by his rough voice and his black paws, so they must open the door to no one but her. Soon someone knocks and calls out that their mother is home. The kids are careful, but the wolf is clever: each time they send him away, he goes to the village for a new trick, to a shopkeeper, a baker and a miller. How it all ends is not revealed here.
Compare two places
El lobo y los siete cabritillos
IV. El panadero y el molinero
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Choose an underlined word.
Speaking to more than one child
The mother talks to all seven kids at once, so she uses the vosotros forms of Spain: escuchad and tened are commands to several people (from escuchar and tener), and podéis and entendéis mean “you can” and “you understand” said to a group. Os is “you” as an object: os come a todos, “he eats you all”. The kids answer for themselves with -mos: lo entendemos, “we understand it”.
A threat in the present tense
Si no lo haces, te como: Spanish often uses the present for what is about to happen, so te como means “I’ll eat you”. Si with the present sets the condition, “if you don’t do it”. Lo stands for what the wolf asks for, and no comes before both the pronoun and the verb. Ahora mismo is “right now”, and the miller’s Bueno, bueno is “all right, all right”.
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 Eso no es cosa tuya, “that’s none of your business”.
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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 Der Wolf und die sieben jungen Geißlein, first published in the first volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen in 1812; the retelling follows the fuller wording of the 1857 edition. The language and length have changed: the present tense, 5 words per sentence on average, and the scenes opened up into short conversations, so the 8 chapters, about 3,500 words, run more than three times the length of the tale itself. The episodes of the source remain: the mother’s warning about the rough voice and the black paws, the chalk from the shopkeeper, the baker’s dough, the miller who gives in out of fear, and the seven hiding places around the house, the clock case among them. 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 tiza (chalk), harina (flour) or palangana (washbasin).
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes: whole-sentence translation comes with the Reader plan. But sentences in this tale average 5 words, so you will rarely need a whole one translated: mostly lines like Eso no es cosa tuya or Han hecho caso a su madre, 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 350 to 550 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 5-6 words per sentence. Only chapter I, which describes the house and the mother’s warning, runs slightly longer at about 6; the chapters with the wolf’s visits are mostly dialogue and about 5.
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 III, “La tiza”.