English · Intermediate
Read Three Men in a Boat in Englishwith every sentence explained
Jerome K. Jerome · 1889
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About the book
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome was first published in 1889. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 66,200 words.
Three friends. One dog. A relaxing holiday on the river that goes hilariously wrong.
J., George and Harris are three young Londoners who are convinced they are seriously ill. In fact they are simply overworked and a little lazy, so they decide that what they need is fresh air and a quiet trip up the River Thames by rowing boat. Montmorency, J.'s small and badly behaved fox terrier, comes too.
Nothing goes to plan. Packing takes all night. Tins cannot be opened without a tin-opener. Harris gets lost in the Hampton Court maze with a crowd of people following him. And along the way J. keeps wandering off into wonderful stories, about his uncle Podger hanging a picture, a very smelly cheese, and the history of the towns they pass.
Published in 1889 and never out of print, this is one of the funniest books ever written in English, and its gentle humour still works perfectly today.
- Author
- Jerome K. Jerome
- First published
- 1889
- Language
- English
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 66,200 words
How it opens
There were four of us—George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were—bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.
We were all feeling seedy, and we were getting quite nervous about it. Harris said he felt such extraordinary fits of giddiness come over him at times, that he hardly knew what he was doing; and then George said that he had fits of giddiness too, and hardly knew what he was doing. With me, it was my liver that was out of order.
Reading Three Men in a Boat 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 intermediate: comfortable once everyday English feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
