I. El huevo grande
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Andersen’s tale adapted for A1
The Ugly Duckling El patito feo
Hans Christian Andersen
Here The Ugly Duckling is retold in simple Spanish: this is a MovaReader adaptation for level A1, not Andersen’s own text (Den grimme Ælling, 1843). In the catalog it is about 3,700 words, 6 words per sentence on average, told in the present tense, and the characters’ lines and thoughts take up almost a third of the words. Its 8 short chapters follow the tale step by step: from the nest under giant leaves and the duck yard to the marsh, an old woman’s cottage and a harsh winter.
- A1
- 3 678 words
- 1 hour
Will this text hold?
A1
This text
It suits A1: sentences average 6 words, the story stays in the present tense, and most new words name birds, animals and things on a farm, so a tap translates them.
Check this passageA2
With room to spare
At A2 it is light reading: the grammar is already familiar, and only country words like heno, juncos or espuelas may make you pause.
Start readingSentences average 6 words, the same as in the Spanish A1 adaptations The Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood, and four words fewer than in the A2 adaptation of Don Quixote (10). A word of 9 letters or more turns up about once in 110 words: once in 55 in Little Red Riding Hood, once in 36 in the adapted Don Quixote, and one word in fourteen in Unamuno’s Mist, the complete Spanish book in the catalog with the shortest sentences (13, level B2). The whole tale has 34 such words, most often alrededor and ronronear. There is no past tense in the text at all, and about 30% of the words belong to the characters’ lines and thoughts. The difficulty is even, from 5.5 words per sentence in chapter II to 7.3 in the final chapter VIII. Together this makes A1. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 3 678
- words
- 6
- words in an average sentence
- 1
- hour of reading
MovaReader. Project Gutenberg
What it is about, without the ending
In the middle of summer a duck sits on her eggs in a nest under giant leaves beside an old farm. The last and biggest egg cracks later than the rest, and out comes a large gray duckling that looks nothing like his brothers and sisters. In the duck yard everyone bites, shoves and mocks him, even his own family, so one morning he runs away. On a marsh he hides from hunters and their dogs, in an old woman’s cottage he sits through the lectures of a smug cat and hen, and in autumn he sees a flock of beautiful white birds he cannot forget. Then a bitter winter sets in. What spring holds for the duckling, this page does not tell.
Compare two places
El patito feo
VI. La gallina y el gato
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Choose an underlined word.
Es and está side by side
Both verbs for “to be” stand side by side here: El trigo es amarillo como el oro, because wheat is yellow by nature, and La avena está verde, because the oats are green only for now, before they ripen. An exclamation is built from qué and an adjective: ¡Qué bonito está el campo!, “how lovely the countryside is!”. Sin parar means “without stopping”: Habla sin parar.
What the cat and the hen can do
Saber with an infinitive means “can” in the sense of a skill: ¿Sabes poner huevos?, “can you lay eggs?”. Entonces here means “then” or “in that case”. Haz el favor de callar sounds polite but is an order: “kindly keep quiet”. Aquí habla la gente lista: “here the clever ones do the talking”, so the duckling gets no say.
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 every new word with no daily limit, and whole sentences too, such as ¡Que te coma el gato!, where coma means not “eats” but “may it eat”.
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Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
An adaptation: MovaReader retold Andersen’s tale itself, so this is not the original text. The source is Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Ugly Duckling” (Den grimme Ælling), first published in 1843; Project Gutenberg has it in an English translation. The language has changed: Andersen tells the story in the past tense, while the retelling uses the present tense, short sentences and everyday words. The length is close to that of a full translation of the tale. All of Andersen’s episodes stay in the same order: the duck yard, the marsh with the hunters, the old woman’s cottage with the cat and the hen, the winter on the lake. A few short lines were added, such as the ducklings’ questions to their mother, and the long descriptions were broken into short sentences.
Is there an audiobook?
No, this retelling exists only as text; MovaReader has no recording of it. A new word translates with a tap, and most often it will name a bird or an animal: cigüeña, ganso or pavo.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
The Reader plan translates a sentence as a whole, and in this tale that helps not with long lines but with unusual ones: ¡Que te coma el gato!, with the form coma that A1 does not teach yet, or Da frío solo de pensarlo, whose meaning does not add up from its words. Single words translate without Reader too, until the daily limit runs out.
How many hours does it take?
Plan on about an hour: that is the pace of a learner who looks up new words, not of a native reader. Chapters run from about 290 to 600 words, so the shortest, chapter II about the first swim, takes only a few minutes.
Where does the text get easier?
It does not get noticeably easier, because the difficulty is even: chapter II averages 5.5 words per sentence, the final chapter VIII 7.3, and the rest fall in between. The last chapter has the most long words, 11 of the tale’s 34, among them primavera, tranquila and vergüenza.
Will my place in the book be saved?
Yes: when you are signed in, the reader holds your bookmark and the words you looked up, so you can come back to the tale any time. Any of the 8 chapters also opens from the contents on this page, for instance chapter VI, about the cat and the hen in the old woman’s cottage.