The Italian reading room
Ranocchino — Little Frog
Capuana’s fiaba of the seventh child sold for a coin and turned into a frog, who holds out his little finger and makes a princess weep.
How long «Ranocchino» is, and how hard
| Length in Italian | 2161 running words · 266 sentences · about 9 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 20 minutes at a learner's pace, with the glosses to hand |
| Different words | 522 dictionary words, averaging 8.1 words a sentence |
| Words glossed | 522 of 522 — every one that appears in the tale |
| Words that appear once | 250 — 48%. A word met once is a word you will not learn from this text alone |
| Where it stands | 6 of 8 by length in the Italian room |
414 of this tale's own 522 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it; 181 carry 80%. Hold those and the reading is close work rather than decoding. Italian drops a vowel before another and marks the place with an apostrophe, and these counts split a word there, the way the room does when you tap it: «l’» and «d’» are words of their own here.
Its chapters
The room reads «Ranocchino» in 6 scenes. The headings are the house's own; the sentence counts are the tale's.
| Scene | In Italian | Sentences |
|---|---|---|
| Who Will Buy Little Frog! | Chi mi compra Ranocchino! | 30 |
| The Old Woman of the Cave | La vecchia della grotta | 31 |
| Hold Out Your Little Finger | Porgi il ditino | 36 |
| The Royal Crown | La corona reale | 44 |
| The Hide and the Eagle | Il cuoio e l’aquila | 56 |
| The Fine Lye | Il bel ranno | 69 |
How it begins
Questa è la bella storia di Ranocchino porgi il ditino, e sentirete qui appresso perchè si dica così.
This is the fine story of Ranocchino-hold-out-your-little-finger, and you shall hear presently why it is called so.
That first sentence is the free sample, and the only one on this page. «Ranocchino» is part of the library — the eight Italian tales and the Russian, German, Spanish and French shelves, every word glossed, sentence-by-sentence English — for €5 a month or €39 a year, cancel whenever you like, one subscription for every room. What the library costs. «Cappuccetto Rosso» is free, entire, if you would rather read the room before you buy it, and the opening scene of «Le arance d’oro» after it.
Shorter and longer in the same room
L’uovo nero — 1943 wordsSpera di sole — 2115 words Il piccolo scrivano fiorentino — 2422 wordsLa giara — 3153 words
All eight Italian tales · Luigi Capuana · the shelf, counted · where to start