French · Beginner
Read Le Merveilleux Voyage de Nils Holgersson à travers la Suède in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Wonderful Adventures of Nils
Selma Lagerlöf · 1906
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Le Merveilleux Voyage de Nils Holgersson à travers la Suède by Selma Lagerlöf was first published in 1906. In Passage you read the full text in the French translation by Thékla Hammar, marked beginner and filed under children and fantasy. It runs to about 103,000 words.
A lazy, mean-tempered boy shrinks to the size of a thumb, and flies off across Sweden on the back of a goose.
Nils Holgersson is fourteen, lives on a farm in Scania, in the far south of Sweden, and is cruel to every animal he meets. One Sunday morning, left alone at home, he catches a tomte, a tiny household elf, in a butterfly net. The elf takes his revenge: suddenly Nils is no bigger than a thumb, and he can understand the animals.
When the farm's white gander tries to follow a flock of wild geese flying north, Nils clings to his neck, and a great journey begins, led by the wise old goose Akka of Kebnekaise.
Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote The Wonderful Adventures of Nils to show Swedish children their own country. Its short, episodic chapters made it a worldwide favourite and a much-loved animated series.
- Author
- Selma Lagerlöf
- First published
- 1906
- Language
- French
- Translated by
- Thékla Hammar
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Children, Fantasy
- Length
- About 103,000 words
How it opens
Il était une fois un gamin d’environ quatorze ans, grand, dégingandé, avec des cheveux blonds comme de la filasse. Il n’était pas bon à grand’chose. Dormir et manger étaient ses occupations favorites; il aimait aussi à jouer de mauvais tours.
Un dimanche matin, ses parents s’apprêtaient à aller au temple; assis en bras de chemise sur un coin de la table, il se réjouissait de les voir partir et d’être son maître pendant une couple d’heures: «Je vais pouvoir, songeait-il, décrocher le fusil de père, et tirer deux ou trois cartouches sans que personne s’en aperçoive.»
Reading Le Merveilleux Voyage de Nils Holgersson à travers la Suède in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in French. 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 French 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.
