Read Dik Trom en zijn Dorpsgenooten in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Dik Trom en zijn Dorpsgenooten by C. Joh. Kieviet is a public-domain classic. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked beginner and filed under children.

The roundest boy in the village has pockets full of mischief and a heart of gold.

It is June, and twelve-year-old Dik Trom is in his last year at the village school. He is the only one who can ride Bertels's wild donkey, he smuggles a mouse into arithmetic class, and his cheeky jackdaw Gerrit shouts greetings through the classroom window. Almost everyone loves him, except Flipsen the constable and the spiteful Bruin Boon.

Then new neighbours arrive from Amsterdam: a smith worn down by a strike and typhoid, his wife, and their thin, blind daughter Nelly. On the very first evening Dik slips his own sausage onto her plate, and soon he is set on bringing some joy into her life, while a stingy old farmer, a bad-tempered monkey and a travelling circus turn the village upside down before the great school trip to the sea.

Kieviet's Dik Trom books have delighted Dutch children for generations and have been filmed more than once.

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 beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of Dutch 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.