II. Las piedras blancas
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Perrault’s tale of seven brothers, for A1
Hop-o’-My-Thumb Pulgarcito
Charles Perrault
This is a retelling of Charles Perrault’s 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 3,800 words told in the present tense, with sentences of 6 words on average. 8 short chapters about the youngest of a poor woodcutter’s seven sons, a boy no bigger than a thumb who says little and hears everything.
- A1
- 3 750 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 bolsillos or ternero 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 longer reading in Spanish.
Start readingThe average sentence has 6 words: the tale moves in short present-tense statements, 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 50 words, and 36 of those 76 long words are the hero’s name, Pulgarcito. The difficulty is even: each of the 8 chapters has 6-7 words per sentence. The catalog’s other Perrault adaptations in Spanish sit close by: Sleeping Beauty at A1 with 6 words per sentence, Puss in Boots at A1 with 7, and Cinderella at A2 with 10. Full texts in Spanish start at B2, where Unamuno’s Mist has 13 words per sentence. Hence A1. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 3 750
- words
- 6
- words in an average sentence
- 1
- hour of reading
MovaReader. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
A poor woodcutter and his wife have seven sons, and the youngest is so small at birth that everyone calls him Pulgarcito, “little thumb”. He speaks so little that his family takes him for a fool, but he listens to everything. In a year of famine he overhears his parents decide to leave the boys in the forest, and before dawn he fills his pockets with white pebbles. The second time the door is locked and he has only his bread, and the birds eat the crumbs. Lost in the dark woods, the seven brothers follow a distant light to a house where an ogre lives. What happens to them there is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Pulgarcito
V. La casa del ogro
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Choose an underlined word.
Without a sound
Sin hacer ruido: “without making a sound”; sin with an infinitive means “without doing”. Se pone debajo de la silla: ponerse here is “to get”, and debajo de means “under”. Allí lo oye todo: “there he hears it all”; Spanish puts lo before the verb even with todo after it. Se llena los bolsillos de piedras: “he fills his pockets with stones”, with de where English has with.
Huele: the verb oler
Oler, “to smell”, turns o into hue when the stress falls on it: huele, hueles, but olemos. Huele a la derecha: he sniffs to the right. Huele a carne fresca: oler a means “to smell of”, here “it smells of fresh meat”. Eso es lo que hueles: “that is what you smell”, with lo que for “what”. Mira mal a su mujer: mirar mal is “to give a hard look”, and a before su mujer is the a Spanish puts before a person as the object.
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 Se queda blanco, “he turns pale”.
ReaderIf this book is not the one
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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 Charles Perrault’s Le Petit Poucet, from Histoires ou contes du temps passé, 1697. The language and length have changed: the present tense, 6 words per sentence on average, a few scenes opened up into short conversations, the narrator’s asides and the verse moral left out. Perrault gives two endings; the retelling follows one of them and mentions the other in a few lines. The episodes of the source remain: the seven sons and the famine, the talk overheard from under the father’s stool, the white pebbles, the ten coins from the village lord, the breadcrumbs eaten by the birds, the light seen from a treetop, the ogre’s kind wife and the smell of fresh meat, the ogre’s seven daughters with golden crowns and the seven-league boots. 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 bolsillos (pockets) or leguas (leagues).
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes: whole-sentence translation comes with the Reader plan. But sentences in this tale average 6 words, so you will rarely need a whole one translated: mostly lines like Comen hasta no poder más or Dales bien de cenar, 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 400 to 600 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 6-7 words per sentence. The first and the last chapter, with more narration, run slightly longer at about 7; the chapters with the most dialogue, such as II, III and V, come to about 6.
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 IV, “Las migas de pan”.