Cendrillon — Cinderella
How long «Cendrillon» is, and how hard
| Length in French | 2208 running words · 89 sentences · about 9 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 20 minutes at a learner's pace, with the glosses to hand |
| Different words | 471 dictionary words, averaging 24.8 words a sentence |
| Words glossed | 471 of 471 — every one that appears in the tale |
| Words that appear once | 249 — 53%. A word met once is a word you will not learn from this text alone |
| Where it stands | 8 of 8 by length in the French room |
361 of this tale's own 471 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it; 132 carry 80%. Hold those and the reading is close work rather than decoding. French glues its small words to the next one, and these counts take them apart the way a dictionary does: «l’» and «d’» are words of their own here, filed under «le» and «de».
Its chapters
The room reads «Cendrillon» in 6 scenes. The headings are the house's own; the sentence counts are the tale's.
| Scene | In French | Sentences |
|---|---|---|
| The Stepmother’s House | La maison de la belle-mère | 8 |
| Getting Ready for the Ball | Les apprêts du bal | 17 |
| The Fairy Godmother | La marraine fée | 21 |
| The First Ball | Le premier bal | 22 |
| The Stroke of Midnight | Le coup de minuit | 7 |
| The Glass Slipper | La pantoufle de verre | 14 |
How it begins
Il était une fois un gentilhomme qui épousa, en secondes noces, une femme, la plus hautaine et la plus fière qu’on eût jamais vue.
Once upon a time there was a gentleman who took for his second wife the haughtiest, proudest woman that was ever seen.
That first sentence is the free sample, and the only one on this page. «Cendrillon» is part of the library — the eight French tales and the Spanish, German and Russian shelves, every word glossed, sentence-by-sentence English — for €5 a month or €39 a year, cancel whenever you like, one subscription for all four rooms. What the library costs. «Le petit Chaperon rouge» is free, entire, if you would rather read the room before you buy it, and the opening scene of «Les Fées» after it.
Shorter and longer in the same room
La Barbe-Bleue — 1804 wordsLa chèvre de monsieur Seguin — 2059 words
All eight French tales · Charles Perrault · the shelf, counted