Read Willem Roda in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Willem Roda by Eli Heimans was first published in 1889. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked intermediate and filed under children and young adult. It runs to about 109,800 words.

A rich boy loses everything overnight — and then one moment of anger changes his life forever.

Willem Roda is almost sixteen when his world falls apart. One autumn evening his family gives a glittering engagement party for his sister Emilia in their grand house on Amsterdam's Herengracht; a few weeks later, the collapse of an English trading house has ruined his father. The Rodas move to a cramped upstairs flat, his mother falls ill, and Emilia's fiancé, Herman, sails for Australia.

Then, in a fight, Willem badly injures another boy — the son of a man who already hates his father. Arrested and branded a criminal, he is sent to a reformatory far from home. There, listening to an old teacher's tales of the free, wide-open life in Queensland, Willem starts to dream of escape.

Eli Heimans, a pioneer of Dutch nature education, wrote Willem Roda (1889) as a gripping adventure for young readers, full of courage, friendship and the wild landscapes of Australia.

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 intermediate: comfortable once everyday Dutch 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.