Fantasy · Children
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alice follows a white rabbit down a hole into a world of mad tea parties and a furious queen.
Five levels, about 80 languages
- A2ElementaryShort sentences and everyday words.
- B1IntermediateYou follow clear stories about familiar things.
- B2Upper intermediateLonger sentences, richer vocabulary.
- C1AdvancedClose to the original, lightly condensed.
- C2ProficientThe complete novel.
One purchase is one book, in one language, at one level: $4.99. Another level of a book you own is $1.99. Editions nobody has asked for yet are written on request: chapter 1 in a few minutes, the rest while you read. How the levels work.
About the book
Down the rabbit hole
On a hot afternoon, bored beside her sister on a riverbank, Alice sees a white rabbit in a waistcoat take a watch out of its pocket and hurry down a rabbit hole. She follows, and falls a very long way. In Wonderland she grows and shrinks with every bite and sip, argues with a caterpillar smoking a hookah, joins a tea party that never ends, plays croquet with flamingos for mallets and stands as a witness at a trial. Lewis Carroll wrote the story for a real girl, Alice Liddell, and published it in 1865.
Why it works for learners
Alice spends the whole book trying to make sense of a world whose rules she doesn’t know, and arguing politely with creatures who use language in strange ways. Any learner will sympathize. The episodes are short and self-contained, and the vocabulary comes from childhood and daily life: food, drink, size, animals, manners, games, half-remembered school lessons.
Carroll’s puns and parodies are the famous problem. Many jokes depend on English words, and translators have always had to invent new ones. At lower levels, expect fewer puns and more plain absurdity; the situations, which are most of the fun, survive intact.
Which level to start at
B1 is a good start, and A2 works well for the story. From B2, more of the wordplay and the logic games come through. If you’re learning English, the C1 and C2 editions let you meet Carroll’s jokes in the language where they were born, and a tap on any phrase explains it in your own.
Read next
- Through the Looking-Glass, Alice’s second adventure
- Peter Pan, another child in a world with its own rules
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, another girl far from home