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Collodi’s tale adapted for level A2
Pinocchio Pinocho
Carlo Collodi
This is not Carlo Collodi’s original text but a retelling of it in simpler Spanish: a MovaReader adaptation for readers who can already follow the past tenses and want the wooden puppet’s whole story. The catalog places it at A2: roughly 9,000 words, with sentences that average just 9 words. Its 12 chapters cover the whole tale: the log that starts talking in an old carpenter’s workshop, the puppet theatre, the Field of Miracles, the Land of Toys and the sea.
- A2
- 8 970 words
- 1-2 hours
Will this text hold?
A1
Earlier
At A1 this is still too big a step: sentences here average 9 words instead of the 6-7 in A1 adaptations, and almost all the narration is in the past tenses.
A1A2
This text
Just right at A2: familiar past tenses, short lines of dialogue and only the occasional long word, about one in 45.
Check this passageB1
With room to spare
At B1 it is light reading to build speed: in 1-2 hours you can finish the whole tale and check how many words you already understand without translation before moving on to the full texts from B2.
Start readingSentences average 9 words, and the story is told in the past: events in the pretérito indefinido (llegó, tomó, gritó), description and repeated actions in the imperfecto (tenía, vivía, lloraba). More than a third of the words are the characters’ lines and thoughts in guillemets, where the present and future tenses also appear. Long words of 9 letters or more are scarce, about one in 45, fewer than in the Don Quixote adaptation (one in 36), and the commonest of them is a name, Comefuego. So it is the sentences and tenses that set the level, not the vocabulary. No chapter stands out: in each of the 12 the average sentence has 8 to 11 words, so the difficulty holds steady from start to finish. A1 adaptations such as The Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood have 6 words per sentence, and the full Spanish texts in the catalog begin at B2, where Unamuno’s Mist has 13 words per sentence and every fourteenth word is a long one. That puts Pinocchio at A2, alongside the retold Don Quixote. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 8 970
- words
- 9
- words in an average sentence
- 1-2
- hours of reading
MovaReader. Project Gutenberg
What it is about, without the ending
Old Geppetto carves a puppet from a log that can talk and names it Pinocchio. As soon as it learns to walk, the puppet runs away from home, ignores the Talking Cricket and sells the spelling book his father gave up his only jacket for, just to get into a puppet theatre. The theatre’s fearsome owner nearly throws Pinocchio on the fire but ends up giving him five gold coins. The Fox and the Cat want those coins and promise that in the Field of Miracles they will grow into a money tree. The Fairy with blue hair saves Pinocchio, and every lie he tells makes his nose grow. Ahead lie a prison, a watchdog’s chain, the sea, school and a friend who calls him to the Land of Toys, where there are no lessons. How the wooden boy’s adventures end is left for the book itself.
Compare two places
Pinocho
X. El País de los Juguetes
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Choose an underlined word.
Pronouns in front of the verb
In Las he perdido, las stands for monedas and comes before he perdido; in Me las he tragado it is joined by me, because tragarse is a pronominal verb: “I’ve swallowed them”. The pretérito perfecto (he perdido, has perdido) is used in the dialogue because the loss matters now: the coins are “gone”. Si se volvía, la nariz chocaba uses the imperfecto for something that happened every time. The Fairy is playing on an old saying that lies have short legs, meaning they never get far.
Comparisons with como and más... que
The coachman is described almost entirely through comparisons: más ancho que alto, “wider than he was tall”, blando como una bola de mantequilla, “soft as a ball of butter”. In una voz dulce como la de un gato, la de replaces la voz de so that voz is not repeated. Metidos como sardinas en lata is the same picture as the English “packed like sardines”. Tiraban de él doce parejas de burros: tirar de means “to pull”, and the subject follows the verb.
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
Whole-sentence translation in Reader helps where Collodi jokes with a turn of phrase rather than a single word: El Caracol, que siempre era tan lento, salió corriendo como una lagartija en agosto.
ReaderIf this book is not the one
All books at this levelBefore you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
What you read here is a MovaReader adaptation: a retelling, not Collodi’s own words. It is based on Carlo Collodi’s Italian tale Le avventure di Pinocchio (The Adventures of Pinocchio), which came out as a book in 1883. The language and length have changed: plain modern Spanish in the past tenses, 9 words per sentence on average, 12 chapters and about 9,000 words, while Collodi’s book has 36 chapters and is almost five times longer. The main episodes remain: the talking log, the puppet theatre, the Fox and the Cat, the Field of Miracles, the nose that grows with every lie and the Land of Toys. Smaller adventures are left out, such as the serpent on the road, the crab in the fight on the beach and the breakfast of plaster bread. Every character comes from Collodi’s book, not from the films: the Talking Cricket has no name here.
Is there an audiobook?
This adaptation has no audio version; MovaReader offers the text only. Tap an unfamiliar word and its translation appears beside it; in Pinocchio many such words are diminutives, like vocecita (“little voice”), barquito (“little boat”) or hombrecillo (“little man”).
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, the Reader plan lets you translate an entire sentence. Sentences here are short, 9 words on average, so you will not need it often: mainly for set phrases such as se quedó de piedra (“was struck dumb”) or sintió un hambre de lobo (“got as hungry as a wolf”), and for commands with pronouns tacked on, like Pélamelas or Llévaselas. On the free plan you can still translate single words, with a cap on how many per day.
How many hours does it take?
Reading the whole adaptation takes 1-2 hours if you stop to translate new words rather than read at a native speaker’s pace. The shortest chapter, VII, “Perro guardián”, has about 460 words, or 5-8 minutes, and the longest, the last one, about 1,100 words, or 11-19 minutes.
Where does the text get easier?
The difficulty is even, with no easier stretch: each of the 12 chapters averages 8 to 11 words per sentence. The shortest sentences are in chapter VII, “Perro guardián”, the longest in chapter VI, “El Campo de los Milagros”. Long words are most frequent in chapter III, about the puppet theatre, where a word of 9 letters or more comes once in 23, partly because of the name Comefuego, and least frequent in chapter XI, once in 75.
Will my place in the book be saved?
It will, as long as you are signed in: next time the reader opens the book where you closed it and still knows which words you opened. The contents on this page also jump straight to a chapter, for example IV, “El Zorro y el Gato”, where Pinocchio first meets two swindlers.