I. El león y el ratón
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12 fables adapted for A1
Aesop’s Fables Fábulas de Esopo
Aesop
This is not the original but MovaReader’s own retelling: twelve of Aesop’s fables in simple Spanish for level A1, written from George Fyler Townsend’s English translation (1867). Altogether the fables run to about 3,800 words; they are told in the present tense, and the average sentence is 6 words long. Each fable fills a short chapter and ends with its moral: the lion and the mouse, the hare and the tortoise, the cicada and the ant, the fox and the grapes, the boy who cried wolf, and seven more.
- A1
- 3 815 words
- 1 hour
Will this text hold?
A1
This text
Right for A1: a fable takes a few minutes, sentences average 6 words and the story is told in the present tense, so you can read one fable at a sitting and translate only single words.
Check this passageA2
With room to spare
At A2 this is light reading with hardly any translation; only a few words such as cántaro, parra or molinero may stop you.
Start readingThe average sentence has 6 words, the same as in the A1 adaptations of The Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood; the A2 adaptation of Don Quixote has 10, and Unamuno’s Mist, where B2 begins in the catalog, has 13. A word of 9 letters or more turns up about once in 240 words, against one in fourteen in Mist: the whole collection has 16 of them, among them trescientos, mentiroso and vergüenza. The story is told in the present tense, one word in four belongs to the characters’ lines, and the moral at the end of each fable fits into one short sentence. No fable stands out: all 12 average between 5 and 7 words per sentence. That puts it at A1. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 3 815
- words
- 6
- words in an average sentence
- 1
- hour of reading
MovaReader. Project Gutenberg
What it is about, without the ending
Twelve short stories in which animals and people behave much as we all do. A lion catches a mouse that runs across his face, and laughs when the mouse promises to help him one day. A hare mocks a slow tortoise, who challenges him to a race. A cicada sings all summer while the ants carry grain, a fox leaps at grapes that hang too high, and a bored shepherd boy shouts to the villagers that the wolf has come. There is also a girl with a pail of milk, a miller and his son who try to please everyone they meet on the road, and a quarrel between the wind and the sun. How each story ends, and what moral Aesop draws from it, is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Fábulas de Esopo
VIII. El molinero, su hijo y el burro
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Choose an underlined word.
The present tense for the future
Spanish often talks about the future in the present tense: ¡Ahora te mato! means “Now I’ll kill you!”, and un día te ayudo yo a ti means “one day I’ll help you too”. The pronoun te goes before the verb: te mato, te ayudo. The upside-down marks ¿ and ¡ open a question or an exclamation, so a question shows from its first word: ¿Quién eres tú?
Polite usted
Spanish speakers address a stranger as usted, and two or more people as ustedes; the verb then takes the third person: usted lo dice, ustedes pueden. So ¿Ese burro es suyo? here means “Is that donkey yours?”, not “his”. Pues no lo parece: “it doesn’t look like it”. The townsman’s joke is that Ustedes dos pueden llevar al burro mejor que él a ustedes: “you two could carry the donkey better than it carries you”.
Chapters
- IEl león y el ratón
- IILa cigarra y la hormiga
- IIILa liebre y la tortuga
- IVEl perro y su reflejo
- VEl pastor mentiroso
- VIEl zorro y el cuervo
- VIILa lechera
- VIIIEl molinero, su hijo y el burro
- IXLa gallina de los huevos de oro
- XLa zorra y las uvas
- XIEl ratón de campo y el ratón de ciudad
- XIIEl viento del norte y el sol
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
With Reader, each moral, like Despacio, pero sin parar, se gana la carrera, translates as a whole sentence, and single words translate without a daily limit.
ReaderIf this book is not the one
Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
This is MovaReader’s own adaptation, not the original text of the fables. The source is Aesop’s fables in George Fyler Townsend’s English translation, Three Hundred Aesop’s Fables, published in 1867. Twelve of the collection’s more than three hundred fables were chosen and retold in Spanish: present tense, short sentences, the most common words. The plots are kept, and the fables are expanded with lines and small scenes that grow out of the story itself, such as the fox’s several tries at reaching the grapes. Every fable ends with a separate Moraleja line; where Townsend gives no separate moral, it is drawn from the end of the story.
Is there an audiobook?
No, there is no audio version of this collection on MovaReader; the fables are for reading. Any unfamiliar word shows its translation when you tap it, and in these fables that is mostly an animal or an object, like liebre, cuervo or cántaro.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Whole sentences translate on the Reader plan. Sentences here are short, 6 words on average, so you will need it less for long structures than for morals and set phrases that do not translate word for word: Nunca se sabe or Lo que te falta es cabeza. Without Reader you can translate single words within a daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
About an hour for the whole collection, reading with translation of unfamiliar words rather than at a native speaker’s pace. The fables are short, roughly 240 to 480 words each, so one takes a few minutes and the collection can be spread over several evenings.
Where does the text get easier?
The collection gets neither easier nor harder: each of the 12 fables averages 5 to 7 words per sentence. The shortest sentences are in the first fable, the lion and the mouse; the longest are in the eighth, the miller, his son and the donkey, and the eleventh, the town mouse and the country mouse. The eighth is also where polite usted appears.
Will my place in the book be saved?
Yes, once you sign in, the reader keeps your place and the words you opened. The fables do not depend on each other, so any of the 12 opens on its own from the contents on this page, for example X, the fox and the grapes.