III. Ricitos de Oro
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Southey’s tale: an adaptation for A1
Goldilocks and the Three Bears Ricitos de Oro y los tres osos
Robert Southey
This is not the original but a retelling in simple Spanish: MovaReader wrote its own A1 version of Robert Southey’s “The Story of the Three Bears” (1837). As in the later retellings, the uninvited guest is not Southey’s old woman but a golden-haired girl, called Ricitos de Oro in the Spanish text. About 3,400 words in 8 short chapters, 7 words per sentence on average: three bears go for a walk while their porridge cools, and a visitor walks into their empty house without asking.
- A1
- 3 379 words
- 1 hour
Will this text hold?
A1
This text
Right for A1: sentences average 7 words, the story is in the present tense, and every scene comes three times with one small change (a big, a middle-sized and a small bowl), so each new word turns up again and again.
Check this passageA2
With room to spare
At A2 this is an easy read in one sitting: nearly everything is familiar, and only single words like cerradura (keyhole) or ronca (gruff) may make you pause.
Start readingThe average sentence has 7 words: one more than in The Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood, adaptations at the same level (6 each), and clearly fewer than in the A2 adaptation of Don Quixote (10) or in Unamuno’s Mist at B2 (13). Words of 9 letters or more are almost absent: the whole text has three, cerradura, desayunar and despierta, each used once, while in Mist every fourteenth word is that long. The story is told in the present tense; only in chapters VII and VIII do the bears switch to the perfect, as in Alguien ha probado mi avena. Chapter by chapter, the average sentence stays between 6 and 8 words, so the level holds from the first page to the last. That makes it A1. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 3 379
- words
- 7
- words in an average sentence
- 1
- hour of reading
MovaReader. Project Gutenberg
What it is about, without the ending
A small house stands in the woods, and three bears live in it: a Great Bear, a Middle Bear and a Little Bear. Each has his own bowl, his own chair, his own bed and his own voice. One morning their porridge comes out too hot, so the bears walk to the river while it cools, and they leave the door unlocked. Meanwhile a hungry, naughty girl with golden curls is wandering through the forest. She finds the empty house and goes in without asking: she tastes the porridge from all three bowls, sits on all three chairs and lies down on all three beds. What happens when the owners come home, this summary leaves to the book.
Compare two places
Ricitos de Oro y los tres osos
VII. La vuelta a casa
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Choose an underlined word.
Why she is called Ricitos de Oro
The paragraph explains the name itself: the girl has lots of rizos, “curls”, and in the sun they shine like gold: brillan como el oro. Ricitos is a diminutive, rizo plus the suffix -ito, with z spelled c before i. In verlo todo, tocarlo todo y probarlo todo the pronoun lo is attached to the infinitive: “to see it all, touch it all and taste it all”. No le gusta nada esperar means “she does not like waiting at all”.
Three voices, one line
Each bear repeats the same line: ¡Alguien ha probado mi avena!, “Somebody has been at my porridge!”. Ha probado is the perfect tense: haber in the present (he, has, ha) plus a participle, so probar gives probado and comer gives comido. The Little Bear adds his own ending: y se la ha comido toda, “and has eaten it all up”; la stands for avena, which is why toda is feminine.
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 lifts the daily limit on word translation and translates whole sentences, so a set phrase like Duerme como un tronco needs no word-by-word puzzling.
ReaderIf this book is not the one
Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
This is MovaReader’s own retelling, not Southey’s text. The source is Robert Southey’s “The Story of the Three Bears”, first printed in 1837 in his book The Doctor and reprinted word for word in Joseph Jacobs’s English Fairy Tales (1890). What differs most is the language: plain Spanish words, short sentences and the present tense instead of Southey’s nineteenth-century English prose. Southey’s intruder is an impudent little old woman; here, as in the later retellings, she is a golden-haired girl called Ricitos de Oro. The text is about two and a half times as long as Southey’s: new scenes that grow out of the tale show the bears’ morning, their walk to the river and the girl’s way through the forest. Southey’s episodes keep their order: three bowls of porridge, three chairs, three beds and three voices, down to his asides about the guest’s bad words and the wooden spoons.
Is there an audiobook?
There is no audiobook: MovaReader offers this tale for reading only. When you meet an unfamiliar word, such as almohada or cerradura, a tap shows its translation.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes: that is part of the Reader plan. The sentences are short, so a whole-sentence translation matters most for set phrases whose meaning does not come from the single words: Duerme como un tronco, “sleeps like a log”, or ¡Menos mal!, “thank goodness!”. Single-word translation also works on the free plan, but a daily limit applies.
How many hours does it take?
Plan on about an hour for the whole tale if you stop to translate new words; that is the pace the catalog counts, not a native speaker’s. The chapters run from about 320 to 540 words, so each one takes a few minutes.
Where does the text get easier?
The level stays flat: chapter averages run from 6 to 8 words per sentence. Chapter III, where Goldilocks appears, has the shortest sentences; chapters I, VII and VIII have the longest. What changes near the end is grammar: in chapters VII and VIII the bears speak in the perfect tense, as in ha probado and se ha sentado.
Will my place in the book be saved?
It does, if you are signed in: your place and the words you looked up are saved, so the tale can wait until another day. The contents on this page also lead straight to each of the 8 chapters, say chapter V, where the guest tries the three chairs.