Cuentos de la selva
Eight tales, written by Horacio Quiroga for his own children and printed in Buenos Aires in 1918, in the Spanish they were printed in — with every word glossed where it stands and an English line under every sentence, out of your eyeline until you ask for it. 17,546 words across 1,298 sentences.
Open the Spanish room → Tap any word for its dictionary form and meaning; tap a sentence for the English. «Las medias de los flamencos» is free, entire, and asks for no account, and the opening scene of «La tortuga gigante» comes free after it. The rest of the shelf is part of the library — €5 a month or €39 a year, and the one subscription opens the Spanish tales, the German ones and the Russian ones alike.
The eight, shortest first
| Tale | In English | Words | Sentences |
|---|---|---|---|
| Las medias de los flamencos free | The Flamingos’ Stockings | 1401 | 101 |
| La tortuga gigante first scene free | The Giant Tortoise | 1710 | 99 |
| La gama ciega library | The Blind Doe | 1870 | 132 |
| El loro pelado library | The Plucked Parrot | 1882 | 149 |
| La abeja haragana library | The Lazy Bee | 2032 | 177 |
| Historia de dos cachorros de coatí y de dos cachorros de hombre library | The Story of Two Coati Cubs and Two Human Children | 2286 | 141 |
| La guerra de los yacarés library | The War of the Caimans | 3017 | 254 |
| El paso del Yabebirí library | The Ford of the Yabebirí | 3348 | 245 |
Shortest first, because that is the order a learner should meet them in — not the order Quiroga printed them in. «Las medias de los flamencos» is 1401 words and reads in a sitting; «El paso del Yabebirí» is 3348. What each one asks of a reader — dictionary words, how many appear only once, words per sentence — is counted at Quiroga, counted.
Why these eight, and why 1918
Because they are among the very few works of literature a beginner in Spanish can read entire and in the original within a few months of starting. Quiroga wrote them for children — his own — so the sentences are short and the vocabulary is concrete: animals, a river, a wound, a debt paid. And they are real literature rather than a graded reader written to a word list: nothing here is simplified, retold or invented, and the shelf holds no adapted text.
The printing is the 1918 first edition, which is very nearly modern Spanish. What it does carry is the written accent the Real Academia only dropped in 1959 — fué, dió, vió, fuí — and the old accented preposition á. Every one of them has today's spelling beside it, so a word you already know cannot hide behind an accent that is no longer printed. These are American Spanish tales: vos and seseo, the Spanish of the Río de la Plata, not Castilian.
What is on each tale's page
Its length in Spanish and its English title; how many minutes it takes to read at a learner's pace; how many dictionary words it uses and how many of them appear exactly once; its chapters; and where it stands on the shelf against the seven others. «Las medias de los flamencos» carries the whole tale, Spanish against English, sentence by sentence — and a page of its own for every sentence in it. «La tortuga gigante» carries its free opening scene the same way.
Questions people ask before they start
How many Spanish words do you need to read a book? · What level is «Cuentos de la selva»? · Can you learn Spanish just by reading? — each answered with this shelf's own numbers rather than a round figure.
The other two rooms
This is one of three rooms in the same house, built on the same reader. The others hold the Russian classics — Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, with seven of them free — and eight German tales from Grimm and Hebel. A reader who comes to Spanish from Spanish rather than to it wants la sala rusa or la sala alemana instead.