English · Beginner
Read The Story of Doctor Dolittle in Englishwith every sentence explained
Hugh Lofting · 1920
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting was first published in 1920. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked beginner and filed under children and fantasy. It runs to about 24,700 words.
A doctor who can talk to animals. A parrot who teaches him how. A journey to save a kingdom of monkeys.
In the little English town of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh lives John Dolittle, a kind doctor who loves animals so much that his house is full of them, and his human patients stop coming. Then his clever parrot, Polynesia, tells him a secret: animals have their own languages, and she can teach him.
Soon Doctor Dolittle is the most famous animal doctor in the world, and creatures travel from far and wide to see him. When news arrives that a terrible sickness is spreading among the monkeys of Africa, he sets sail with his loyal friends: Jip the dog, Dab-Dab the duck, Gub-Gub the pig and Chee-Chee the monkey.
Full of gentle humour and wonderful creatures like the two-headed pushmi-pullyu, this 1920 classic has delighted children ever since.
- Author
- Hugh Lofting
- First published
- 1920
- Language
- English
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Children, Fantasy
- Length
- About 24,700 words
How it opens
ONCE upon a time, many years ago—when our grandfathers were little children—there was a doctor; and his name was Dolittle—John Dolittle, M.D. “M.D.” means that he was a proper doctor and knew a whole lot.
He lived in a little town called, Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. All the folks, young and old, knew him well by sight. And whenever he walked down the street in his high hat everyone would say, “There goes the Doctor!—He’s a clever man.” And the dogs and the children would all run up and follow behind him; and even the crows that lived in the church-tower would caw and nod their heads.
Reading The Story of Doctor Dolittle 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.
