Read Uit het leven van Dik Trom in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Uit het leven van Dik Trom by C. Joh. Kieviet was first published in 1891. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked beginner and filed under children. It runs to about 36,000 words.

The chubbiest baby the village has ever seen — and the cheekiest boy it will ever know.

From the day he is born, little Dirk Trom is “a natural wonder”: cheeks like doughnuts, legs like a wrestler's and an appetite to match. The carpenter's son soon earns the name everyone remembers — Dik (Fatty) Trom — and an even greater reputation for mischief.

Dik squabbles with the midwife, terrorises the village schoolmistress, drives grumpy neighbour Flipsen to fury and keeps an eye on sneaky Bruin Boon, who is always ready to let someone else take the blame. Yet Dik never lies, never steals and has a heart as big as his belly, as the lonely old “witch” of the Back Lane and a badly treated old donkey will discover.

First published in 1891, C. Joh. Kieviet's comic classic has been reprinted more than seventy-five times, filmed several times, and remains the best-known Dutch children's book of its age.

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.