English · Advanced
Read Robinson Crusoe in Englishwith every sentence explained
Daniel Defoe · 1719
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About the book
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe was first published in 1719. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 120,500 words.
One shipwreck. One survivor. Twenty-eight years alone on an island.
Young Robinson Crusoe ignores his father's advice to live a quiet, safe life in England. He wants adventure, and he goes to sea. Storms, pirates and slavery follow, then a new life as a planter in Brazil. But when he sails on one more risky voyage, his ship is wrecked in a terrible storm, and he is washed up alone on an unknown island.
With only what he can rescue from the wreck, Crusoe must learn everything from nothing: building a shelter, hunting, growing grain, making pots, keeping a calendar, and fighting fear and loneliness. Year after year he makes the island his kingdom, until the day he finds a single human footprint in the sand.
First published in 1719 and often called the first English novel, Robinson Crusoe is the original survival story, and has been retold countless times.
- Author
- Daniel Defoe
- First published
- 1719
- Language
- English
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Thriller and Suspense
- Length
- About 120,500 words
How it opens
I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but, by the usual corruption of words in England, we are now called—nay, we call ourselves and write our name—Crusoe; and so my companions always called me.
Reading Robinson Crusoe 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 advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
