Fantasy · Animals
The Wind in the Willows
Mole, Rat and Badger try to save the reckless Mr Toad from his love of fast motor cars.
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
Messing about in boats
One spring morning Mole throws down his brush, abandons his spring cleaning and wanders up into the sunshine, where he sees a river for the first time. There he meets the Water Rat, who takes him out in his boat and explains that there is nothing half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Their friends include wise, gruff Badger, who lives deep in the Wild Wood, and the rich, boastful Mr Toad of Toad Hall, who falls for every new craze, from boating to caravans to motor cars, and gets into serious trouble over the last. Kenneth Grahame, a senior official at the Bank of England, published it in 1908; it grew out of bedtime stories for his son.
Why it works for learners
The book alternates between two kinds of chapter. The Toad chapters are farce: escapes, disguises, boasting, chases. They’re fast, funny and easy to follow at any level. The river chapters are slower and lyrical: the seasons, homesickness, a winter evening in a warm burrow, a summer dawn. Together they give you two vocabularies: the action verbs of the Toad plot, and the everyday words of home, food, weather and the countryside. The friends’ conversations are warm and characterful, and each animal has a recognizable way of speaking.
Which level to start at
B1 suits most learners. A2 works for the Toad story, which carries the plot. The quieter chapters, especially “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”, are among the most admired prose in English children’s literature and are best enjoyed at B2 and above, perhaps in sentence-by-sentence mode, one line and its audio at a time.
Read next
- The Secret Garden, the English seasons through a child’s eyes
- The Jungle Book, animals with laws of their own
- Black Beauty, the English countryside from a horse’s point of view