Read 20.000 Mijlen onder Zee: Oostelijk Halfrond in Dutchwith every sentence explained

20.000 Mijlen onder Zee: Oostelijk Halfrond by Jules Verne was first published in 1870. In Passage you read the full text in Dutch, marked intermediate and filed under science fiction.

It is 1866, and something enormous is ramming ships on every ocean.

Sailors describe a glowing shape, longer and faster than any whale, that crosses whole seas in a few days. Professor Pierre Aronnax of the Paris Museum, his loyal Flemish servant Koenraad and the hot-tempered Canadian harpooner Ned Land join the American frigate Abraham Lincoln to hunt it down. When the hunt goes wrong, the three men wake up aboard the Nautilus, a submarine commanded by the mysterious Captain Nemo, a man who has turned his back on dry land for good.

This Dutch edition, 20.000 Mijlen onder Zee: Oostelijk Halfrond, covers the first half of the voyage: underwater forests, hunting trips on the seabed, the wrecks of Vanikoro, the treacherous Torres Strait and the kingdom of coral. Aronnax is dazzled. Ned Land only wants to escape.

Jules Verne's undersea adventure has inspired explorers, engineers and film-makers since 1870.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Dutch. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday Dutch feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.