I. Рукавичка
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Five folk tales retold for A1
The Mitten and Other Tales Рукавичка та інші казки
Ukrainian folk tales
This is not an original text but MovaReader’s own retelling, in simple Ukrainian, of five folk tales that almost every Ukrainian child hears at bedtime: Рукавичка (The Mitten), Колобок (the runaway bun), Коза-дереза (the lying goat), Солом’яний бичок (The Straw Ox) and Пан Коцький (Pan Kotskyi, the cat who passes for a lord). It is for readers who are just starting Ukrainian: about 3,400 words in 7 short chapters, told in the present tense, with sentences of 5 words on average and lots of dialogue.
- A1
- 3 397 words
- 1 hour
Will this text hold?
A1
This text
You can manage it at A1 if you know the present tense and a few hundred everyday words: each tale repeats its key lines, such as Хто, хто в цій рукавичці? (“Who, who is in this mitten?”), the bun’s song and the goat’s chant, so by the third time you read them without a tap.
Check this passageA2
With room to spare
At A2 the tales read almost without translation: good for building speed, and for the folk rhymes and pet names like зайчик-побігайчик (the running bunny) that Ukrainians quote all their lives.
Start readingThe average sentence has 5 words, and 146 of the 314 paragraphs are lines of dialogue, about two words in five. The narration stays in the present tense; past forms such as з’їла (ate up) or приніс (brought) turn up only in a few lines. Words of 9 letters or more make up 3.6% of the text, and 29 of those 115 long words are forms of рукавичка (mitten) itself. Complete Ukrainian texts in the catalogue start at B2: Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s Intermezzo, the shortest of them, has 9.8 words per sentence and 6.3% long words, and Ivan Franko’s Boa Constrictor has 14.9 and 10.0%. The difficulty is even: chapter I averages 4.2 words per sentence and the other six 5.2-5.5. Hence A1. This is the catalogue’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 3 397
- words
- 5
- words in an average sentence
- 1
- hour of reading
MovaReader. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
An old man drops his mitten in the snowy forest, and one animal after another asks to come in out of the cold: a mouse, a frog, a hare, a fox, a wolf, a bear and a wild boar. A poor old couple bake a round bun from the last flour swept out of a chest, and the bun rolls off down the road, singing a song to everyone who wants to eat it. An old man buys a goat that always swears it has had nothing to eat or drink, and the whole family pays for its lies, until the goat takes over a fox’s little house. An old woman asks for an ox made of straw and tar and sends it out to graze, and the forest animals get stuck to it one by one. And an old cat left in the forest tells a fox that he is the fearsome Pan Kotskyi, so the other animals cook a dinner to get a look at him. What happens next in each tale is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Рукавичка та інші казки
IV. Коза в хатці лисички
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Rhyming pet names, and пусти / пустіть
Every animal in the mitten has a rhyming nickname: мишка-скряботушка (the scratching mouse), жабка-скрекотушка (the croaking frog), зайчик-лапанчик (the bunny with big paws). The second half only echoes the first, so read it as part of the name and don’t stop to look it up. Watch the verb too: the frog asks one mouse, Пусти і мене! (“let me in too”), but the hare asks two animals, so he says Пустіть, the plural and polite form of the imperative.
The goat’s chant: old money and short participles
Копа is an old counting unit of sixty, here sixty coins, so За три копи куплена means “bought for three kopas”, a boast about a cheap goat. Куплена (bought) and луплена (skinned) are short passive participles in the feminine, agreeing with коза; everyday speech would say її купили, “they bought her”. The rhyme is fixed, and Ukrainians know it by heart, so it is worth learning as a whole.
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 easy words add up to a folk formula, as in Тільки бігла через місточок, схопила кленовий листочок, “I only ran across a little bridge and grabbed a maple leaf”.
ReaderIf this book is not the one
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Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
An adaptation, not an original text. It is MovaReader’s own retelling in simple modern Ukrainian of five anonymous folk tales. Four of them, Рукавичка, Колобок, Коза-дереза and Пан Коцький, follow the versions recorded in the Poltava and Kyiv provinces and printed by Ivan Rudchenko in Народныя южнорусскія сказки (“South Russian Folk Tales”, the imperial-era name for Ukrainian ones; Kyiv, 1869-1870), read on Wikisource in that edition’s 19th-century spelling. Солом’яний бичок, which Rudchenko does not have, follows the version in the children’s collection Баю-баю (Kyiv: Krynytsia, 1918). What changed: the old spelling and Poltava dialect forms became standard modern Ukrainian, the narration moved to the present tense, and scenes were opened up into short conversations, so the book is several times longer than its sources; a few violent details of the 1869 versions were also softened. The animals, the episodes and the folk rhymes remain. The source texts themselves are not in the catalogue.
Is there an audiobook?
No, there is no audio version of these tales on MovaReader; the text is read on screen. Tap an unfamiliar word and its translation appears: here that will often be village words such as призьба (the earth bench along the outside wall of a house) or погріб (cellar).
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes: whole-sentence translation comes with the Reader plan. But sentences here average 5 words, so you will need it less for their length than for folk formulas such as За три копи куплена, пів боку луплена (“bought for three kopas, half my side skinned”), where every word is easy to look up but the line still puzzles. 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 book, at the pace of someone who still translates new words, not a native speaker’s. The 7 chapters run from about 360 to 630 words, and each tale takes one or two chapters, so a tale is easy to read in one sitting.
Where does the text get easier?
The difficulty is even from start to finish. Chapter I, Рукавичка, has the shortest sentences (4.2 words on average) but the most long words, because рукавичка and its forms count as long; chapters II-VII all average 5.2-5.5 words per sentence.
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 7 chapters directly, for example chapter VII, Пан Коцький.