The French reading room
Le petit Chaperon rouge — Little Red Riding Hood
Read «Le petit Chaperon rouge» in the room Every word is glossed where it stands, the English is a tap away and never in your eyeline until you ask, and the opening scene needs no account.
How long «Le petit Chaperon rouge» is, and how hard
| Length in French | 683 running words · 36 sentences · about 3 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 6 minutes at a learner's pace, with the glosses to hand |
| Different words | 178 dictionary words, averaging 19.0 words a sentence |
| Words glossed | 178 of 178 — every one that appears in the tale |
| Words that appear once | 85 — 48%. A word met once is a word you will not learn from this text alone |
| Where it stands | 1 of 8 by length in the French room |
144 of this tale's own 178 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it; 68 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 «Le petit Chaperon rouge» in 4 scenes. The headings are the house's own; the sentence counts are the tale's.
| Scene | In French | A line from it | Sentences |
|---|---|---|---|
| In the Village free | Au village | Va voir comment se porte ta mère-grand, car on m’a dit qu’elle était malade. | 4 |
| In the Wood | Dans le bois | 8 | |
| Knock, Knock | Toc, toc | 11 | |
| In the Bed | Dans le lit | 13 |
How it opens — «In the Village», French with English, sentence by sentence
This is the scene the house gives away: the whole of it, in the French it was printed in, with the English under every line. It asks for no account anywhere — not here and not in the room.
Il était une fois une petite fille de village, la plus éveillée qu’on eût su voir : sa mère en était folle, et sa mère-grand plus folle encore.
Once upon a time there was a little village girl, the brightest, liveliest child you could ever have seen: her mother was mad about her, and her grandmother madder still.
Cette bonne femme lui fit faire un petit chaperon rouge qui lui seyait si bien, que partout on l’appelait le petit Chaperon rouge.
This good woman had a little red hood made for her, which suited her so well that everywhere she went she was called Little Red Riding Hood.
Un jour, sa mère ayant cuit et fait des galettes, lui dit : « Va voir comment se porte ta mère-grand, car on m’a dit qu’elle était malade.
One day her mother, having made and baked some cakes, said to her: “Go and see how your grandmother is, for I have been told that she is ill.
Porte-lui une galette et ce petit pot de beurre. »
Take her a cake and this little pot of butter.”
The scene above is the free instalment, and where it stops is where the library begins. «Le petit Chaperon rouge» is part of the library — the eight French tales and the Italian, 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 five rooms. What the library costs. «La Dernière Classe» is free, entire, if you would rather read the room before you buy it.
Shorter and longer in the same room
Les Fées — 860 wordsLe maître Chat ou le Chat botté — 1,586 words
Every sentence of the free scene, with its own page
Each of these is one sentence of «Le petit Chaperon rouge» in French, its English, a recording of it, and a gloss for every word in it — dictionary form and meaning.
- Il était une fois une petite fille de village, la plus éveillée qu’on eût su voir : sa mère en était folle, et sa mère-grand plus folle encore.
- Cette bonne femme lui fit faire un petit chaperon rouge qui lui seyait si bien, que partout on l’appelait le petit Chaperon rouge.
- Un jour, sa mère ayant cuit et fait des galettes, lui dit : « Va voir comment se porte ta mère-grand, car on m’a dit qu’elle était malade.
- Porte-lui une galette et ce petit pot de beurre. »
All eight French tales · Charles Perrault · the shelf, counted