English · Beginner
Read Just So Stories in Englishwith every sentence explained
Rudyard Kipling · 1902
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling was first published in 1902. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked beginner and filed under children and fantasy. It runs to about 28,600 words.
How did the camel get his hump? Why does the leopard have spots? Listen, O Best Beloved...
Rudyard Kipling first told these stories at bedtime to his young daughter, and she insisted that they be told "just so", exactly the same way every time. The result is one of the most playful books in the English language.
Each tale explains, in its own wonderfully silly way, how something in the animal world came to be. A shipwrecked sailor gives the whale a very small throat. A lazy camel who only ever says "Humph!" gets a hump of his own. A curious young elephant with a short nose asks the crocodile what he eats for dinner. And the cat, of course, walks by himself.
Full of rhythm, jokes and invented words, and best read aloud, these 1902 stories have been children's favourites for more than a hundred years.
- Author
- Rudyard Kipling
- First published
- 1902
- Language
- English
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Children, Fantasy
- Length
- About 28,600 words
How it opens
IN the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale, and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, and the crab and the dab, and the plaice and the dace, and the skate and his mate, and the mackereel and the pickereel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel. All the fishes he could find in all the sea he ate with his mouth—so! Till at last there was only one small fish left in all the sea, and he was a small ‘Stute Fish, and he swam a little behind the Whale’s right ear, so as to be out of harm’s way.
Reading Just So Stories in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. 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 English 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.
