I. La casa junto al bosque
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A Grimm tale adapted for A2 readers
Hansel and Gretel Hansel y Gretel
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
This is not the original but MovaReader’s own retelling: the well-known Brothers Grimm tale told in simpler Spanish for readers who can already follow a story in the past tense. In the catalog it is A2: about 3,400 words, 9 words per sentence on average, 8 short chapters and roughly an hour of reading. A brother and sister are twice left alone in the deep forest, find a little house made of bread and sugar and have to outwit its owner.
- A2
- 3 389 words
- 1 hour
Will this text hold?
A1
Earlier
At A1 the past tense will hold you up: Little Red Riding Hood at that level is told in the present, while here every event is in the pretérito indefinido or imperfecto (llegó, se durmieron, vivía), and sentences are longer, 9 words against 6.
A1A2
This text
At A2 it fits well: sentences of 9 words, the past tenses you know, everyday words about bread, the forest and home, and a long word only about once in 63 words.
Check this passageB1
With room to spare
At B1 the tale reads almost without translation, in an hour or less, and makes an easy warm-up before the full Spanish texts in the catalog, which start at B2.
Start readingTwo things set the level at A2. The first is sentence length: 9 words on average, while Little Red Riding Hood, an A1 adaptation of the same Grimms, has 6 and the A2 adaptation of Don Quixote has 10. The second is tense. Little Red Riding Hood is told in the present, and here the whole story is in the past: events in the pretérito indefinido (se levantó, llenó, salió), circumstances and habits in the imperfecto (vivía, brillaba, sacaba). The vocabulary does not raise the level: there are only 54 long words, of 9 letters or more, in the whole text, about one in 63, slightly fewer than in Little Red Riding Hood, and more than three quarters of them are simply verbs like respondió or caminaron. No chapter stands out: the 8 chapters average between 8 and 10 words per sentence. Full Spanish texts in the catalog start at B2 with Unamuno’s Mist, which has 13 words per sentence and a long word roughly every fourteenth word. So the verdict is A2. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 3 389
- words
- 9
- words in an average sentence
- 1
- hour of reading
MovaReader. Project Gutenberg
What it is about, without the ending
A hungry year comes to a poor woodcutter, and Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother talks her husband into leaving the children deep in the forest. The children overhear the conversation at night. The first time, Hansel secretly drops white pebbles along the path, and by moonlight they show the way home. The second time the door is locked, so he crumbles bread in his pocket, but the birds eat the crumbs. On the third day of wandering, a white bird leads the brother and sister to a little house with walls of bread, a roof of cake and windows of sugar. The kind old woman turns out to be a witch: she locks Hansel in a stable to fatten him up and makes Gretel fetch water and cook. What happens when the old woman runs out of patience is not told here.
Compare two places
Hansel y Gretel
VI. El dedo de Hansel
: «, . ».
. , . . . «¡ !», . «¿ ? ¡ !». .
Choose an underlined word.
A chain of actions against the night
Everything Hansel does is in the pretérito indefinido: se levantó, se puso, abrió, salió, se agachó, llenó. Each of these verbs moves the scene one step on. The night around him is in the imperfecto: la luna brillaba, había muchas piedras, parecían monedas, because these are circumstances, not events. Se puso el abrigo means “he put on his coat”. Todas las piedras que pudo: “as many pebbles as he could fit”. De verdad after a noun means “real”. No nos va a dejar solos uses ir a with an infinitive, the simplest way to talk about the future.
What happened every morning
Cada mañana sets up a habit, so the verbs here are in the imperfecto: iba, gritaba, sacaba, veía, creía, decía, engordaba. This is how Spanish tells what happened day after day rather than once. Huesito is the diminutive of hueso, just as casita comes from casa. En lugar del dedo: “instead of the finger”. No se daba cuenta: “she did not notice”, from darse cuenta. ¿Cómo puede ser?: “How can that be?”.
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
Here Reader is needed only for a few folk sayings whose meaning does not add up from the single words, such as Ya se sabe: si cedes una vez, tienes que ceder también la segunda.
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Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
No, this is not the original: MovaReader wrote this text as a retelling for learners. The source is Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s tale Hänsel und Gretel, first published in 1812 in the collection Kinder- und Hausmärchen; the retelling follows its text in Grimms’ Fairy Tales on Project Gutenberg. The language has changed: plain modern Spanish in the past tenses, 9 words per sentence on average, and the tale is split into 8 chapters. In length the retelling stays close to the source, about 3,400 words against roughly 2,900 in the English text on Gutenberg: scenes are opened up into dialogue, and a few short talks between brother and sister are added, such as a night-time talk at the stable. Every episode of the tale remains: the pebbles, the breadcrumbs, the white bird, the house of bread, the little bone instead of a finger, and the ending is the same as in the Grimms. A full Spanish version of Hansel and Gretel is not in the catalog yet.
Is there an audiobook?
Hansel and Gretel comes without audio here: the page offers the text alone. Tap an unfamiliar word and its translation appears beside it; here these are mostly words of the forest and the house, such as leña, hacha, migas or delantal.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
The Reader plan translates whole sentences, but the sentences in this tale are short, 9 words on average, so translating single words, which the free plan offers up to a daily limit, will mostly do. A sentence translation helps with rhymes like Muerde que muerde, ¿quién muerde mi casita? and with turns like Ya se nos va a ocurrir algo.
How many hours does it take?
Plan on about an hour, reading slowly and checking unfamiliar words as they come up. A chapter has about 420 words on average, or 4-7 minutes, so you can read the tale in one evening or one chapter a day.
Where does the text get easier?
The tale has no harder or easier parts: from chapter to chapter, sentences stay within 8-10 words. The shortest sentences are in chapter VI, “El dedo de Hansel”, 8 words on average, the longest in IV, “La casita de pan”, 10. Long words are spread unevenly: one in 130 words in chapter V, and one in 34 in the last chapter, VIII, for example enseguida, demasiado, reconocía.
Will my place in the book be saved?
Yes, as long as you are signed in: the reader stores the spot where you stopped along with the words you tapped. The contents on this page also lead straight to any chapter, for example III, “Las migas de pan”, where Hansel drops breadcrumbs along the path.