Read Contes choisis de la famille in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Contes choisis de la famille by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm was first published in 1812. In Passage you read the full text in French, marked beginner and filed under children and fantasy.

Clever foxes, boastful wolves, and a little pot that will not stop cooking.

This French selection gathers twenty short tales, most of them from the household stories collected by the Brothers Grimm. They are brisk, earthy and often funny: animals scheme and bluff, peasants outwit their betters, and good sense usually wins out over pride.

A wolf who boasts that he fears no one insists on meeting a man face to face, and learns why the fox preferred to stay home. A poor girl is given a magic pot that cooks sweet porridge on command, until her mother forgets the words that make it stop. A peasant named Écrevisse sets himself up as an all-knowing doctor, and a fiddler with a marvellous violin plays tricks on the forest animals who want lessons.

Most tales run only a few pages, which makes Selected Family Tales an easy, cheerful way into French, and a reminder of why the Grimms’ stories have been told at bedtime for two hundred years.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in French. 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 beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of French and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.