Read Het huisje aan de sloot in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Het huisje aan de sloot by Carry van Bruggen was first published in 1921. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked intermediate and filed under children and historical fiction. It runs to about 72,100 words.

A little house by the water, a pair of twins, and a whole world of Sabbaths, festivals and childhood wonder.

In a small Dutch harbour town, a nine-year-old girl and her twin brother lean over the rickety fence by the ditch behind their house, waiting for the rats to come out of their “palace” under the shed across the water. Everything is big and mysterious to them: the white tablecloth that turns an ordinary Friday evening into the Sabbath, the half-holidays of Purim and Hanukkah, bets and quarrels at school, and the day the news comes that Aunt Froukje has died.

They grow up in a modest, devout Jewish family, with a father who knows every rule and a gentle mother, slowly discovering how wide and puzzling the world outside can be.

Carry van Bruggen's The Little House by the Ditch (1921) draws on her own childhood in Zaandam. Told in short, glowing chapters through a child's eyes, it is gentle, funny and deeply moving.

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.