Read Het wassende water in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Het wassende water by Herman de Man was first published in 1925. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 58,900 words.

A proud farm in the middle of the polder. A mother who rules it like a man. A son who loves the wrong girl.

At Water-Snoodt, a rich old farmstead in Hoenkoop behind the river IJssel, the widow Beijen runs her late husband's land with an iron hand. She has married her eldest son off to a wealthy young widow, and expects the same obedience from the rest. But her second son Gieljan, a shy giant of twenty-seven, falls headlong for Nelia, the black-haired daughter of a poor day labourer who lives on an old boat.

A farmer's son does not marry a labourer's child. Gieljan must choose between his heart and the stern sense of duty he carries like a snail its house — a choice that will mark his whole life, while beyond the dikes the winter rivers keep rising.

Written in the rich dialect of the Dutch river country, Herman de Man's The Rising Water (1925) was a steady bestseller: a powerful drama of family, faith and flood.

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.