Spanish books for A1

At A1 you know the most common words and the present tense. The classics offer no complete texts at this level, so this shelf holds MovaReader adaptations: tales by the Brothers Grimm, Perrault, Andersen and Joseph Jacobs, Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Hawthorne’s King Midas, Aesop’s fables and folk tales from Spain, England, Norway and America, retold in simple Spanish. Each book takes about an hour.

The catalog measures two things: the average sentence length and the share of long words, 9 letters or more. Every book on the shelf averages 5-7 words per sentence, all in the present tense. Long words are rare: from about one in a thousand in Goldilocks and the Three Bears to one in 35 in The Emperor’s New Clothes, where more than half of them are the word emperador itself. The difficulty is even in every chapter. For comparison, the simplest complete text in the catalog, Ellen M. Cyr’s school reader Libro segundo de lectura, has 8 words per sentence, tells its lessons in the past tenses and sits at A2.

A1

25 books

King Midas El rey Midas Nathaniel Hawthorne Hawthorne’s Greek myth retold for A1 4 081 words 1 hour

Where to start

Start with The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats or The Little Red Hen and Other Farm Tales, the shelf’s shortest sentences at 5 words, or with The Three Little Pigs or Town Musicians of Bremen: 6 words per sentence and hardly a single long word. Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, The Frog Prince and King Midas are just as easy, with at most one long word in 140. Aesop’s Fables suits a short evening: 12 fables, each its own chapter with its moral; The Princess and the Pea and Other Tales likewise gathers four short Andersen tales, two chapters each. Puss in Boots, Ratoncito Pérez, Goldilocks and the Three Bears and The Vain Little Mouse have slightly longer sentences, 7 words, so they make a good next step. The Emperor’s New Clothes has the most long words on the shelf, so it is a good one to read last.

How these books read in MovaReader

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Before you read

Are these the original texts?

No, these are MovaReader adaptations: fairy tales and fables retold in simple Spanish for A1. Each follows a public-domain source: tales by the Brothers Grimm, Perrault, Andersen, Jacobs and Southey, Browning’s poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin and Hawthorne’s King Midas, Aesop’s fables, The Gingerbread Man and The Little Red Hen from American and English folklore, folk tales as written down by Fernán Caballero and Luis Coloma’s Ratón Pérez. The episodes of the sources are kept, the language is simplified.

How is A1 different from A2 in this catalog?

In sentence length and tense. At A1 sentences average 5-7 words and everything is in the present tense; at A2 they average 9-10 words and the story is told in the past tenses.

How long does a book take?

About an hour each: the books on the shelf run from 3,300 to 4,100 words. The chapters are short, a few hundred words each, so one takes a few minutes.

What should I read after A1?

The A2 shelf: Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Don Quixote adaptation and other books told in the past tenses, at 9-10 words per sentence. The first complete Spanish text in the catalog is on that shelf too: Ellen M. Cyr’s school reader Libro segundo de lectura.