Read School-idyllen in Dutchwith every sentence explained

School-idyllen by Top Naeff was first published in 1900. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked beginner and filed under romance and young adult. It runs to about 54,300 words.

Four friends, one tea party, and a new girl nobody expected.

Jet van Marle is fifteen, cheerful, and has not had a single good school report in nine years — worrying about it, she says, would be no life at all. With Jeanne, “the Model”, who never cheats, and the sisters Lien and Noes Terhorst, she copies sums, whispers answers and puts on her special face for the reading of the marks at Juffrouw Prior's school, where everyone is supposed to speak French.

Then the new girl arrives to sit next to Jet. She is not the shy little mouse they imagined, but a tall, thin girl with frizzy red hair, dressed all in black, with a diamond bracelet and grave grey eyes — who calmly introduces herself by her noble title: “Freule van Eyghen.”

Balls, a crush on a lieutenant, holidays, an amateur theatre club and true friendship: Top Naeff's School Idylls (1900) is a warm, funny classic of Dutch girlhood that stayed in print for over half a century.

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 beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of Dutch 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.