Read Wilde Bob in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Wilde Bob by C. Joh. Kieviet was first published in 1900. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked beginner and filed under children. It runs to about 56,000 words.

Every village has a boy who gets into trouble. This village has Bob.

Dorus Volmaar does his homework first and plays afterwards — at least, he tries to. Because across the brook lives his best friend, Bob, known to everyone as Wild Bob: a boy who gets up to more mischief in a week than all the other boys together manage in a year. On stilts, with a stolen squirt of water or a pot of syrup, Bob is always one step ahead of the maid, the shoemaker and the vicar — and usually just one step ahead of a good hiding.

With Dorus and their friend Karel Holm at his side, Bob turns rainy Sundays, fishing trips and a swim into adventures, crosses paths with a travelling bear-leader, and proves again and again that under all the wildness beats an honest, generous heart.

C. Joh. Kieviet, the creator of Dik Trom, wrote this lively village story around 1900, and it was a favourite with Dutch children for decades.

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.