Read De kleine Johannes in Dutchwith every sentence explained

De kleine Johannes by Frederik van Eeden was first published in 1887. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked intermediate and filed under children and fantasy. It runs to about 37,800 words.

A boy, a dog and an elf who rides on a dragonfly. A fairy tale that grows up as you read it.

Little Johannes lives in an old house with a big garden near the dunes, with his faithful dog Presto. One summer evening he drifts out on the pond in his little boat and meets Windekind, a delicate elf-spirit who steps out of a blue dragonfly. Windekind leads him into a secret world: Johannes shrinks to the size of a beetle, learns the language of crickets and ants, and sleeps in the heart of a flower.

But Johannes wants more than wonder — he wants to know why everything is the way it is. That longing brings him strange companions, like the sly little gnome Wistik, and sends him in search of the one book that explains it all.

Frederik van Eeden's Little Johannes (1887) is the great Dutch literary fairy tale: dreamlike, funny and wise, loved by children and adults for more than a century.

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.