Read Cuentos populares en Chile in Spanishwith every sentence explained

Cuentos populares en Chile by Ramón A. Laval was first published in 1923. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked beginner and filed under children and fantasy. It runs to about 89,000 words.

Enchanted princesses, clever soldiers, witches, devils and talking toads, straight from the storytellers' lips.

In the early 1900s, the folklorist Ramón A. Laval went around Chile asking ordinary people to tell him the stories they knew: children, carpenters, priests, grandmothers, even a man of ninety-two. He wrote them down just as he heard them, and each tale still carries a note on who told it and where.

The first part is full of fairy tales and animal fables. A bold little soldier sets off "to see the world" in the service of a prince; an old fisherman catches an enchanted fish; and in "Salir con su domingo siete", a kind hunchback finishes a witches' song and is rewarded. The second part gathers eerie local legends, like La Calchona, a witch trapped forever in the shape of a sheep, along with haunted lagoons and pacts with the Devil.

In simple, lively Spanish with a Chilean flavour, Popular Tales of Chile (1923) is perfect for dipping into one story at a time.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Spanish. 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 Spanish 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.