MyOwnLingo Dutch
Sign in Make an accountSign up

Daily story

One story for each level, told a short chapter at a time, by email each morning if you like. Each chapter brings in a few new words and keeps using the ones before, so the story grows with you.

How to read it

  1. Read at your level: you should know about eight words in ten. Pick the level where that's true.
  2. Look at the title and the set-up line first. They give you the scene.
  3. Read the whole chapter through without stopping to look things up. Just follow the story.
  4. Pause: what happened, and to whom? The questions help.
  5. Read it again with the help on: the words glossed, the English for each sentence, the notes.
  6. Keep going: the next chapter comes tomorrow.

Make a free account and the next chapter comes each morning, at your level and your pace.

Read the first chapter Create a free account

The stories

De zwarte kat A1

The Black Cat

Lotte has just moved to Leiden, an old university town in the Netherlands, to study. On her first morning a black cat is waiting at her door with a scrap of paper, and on the paper is a number. Every morning the cat comes back, and every morning the number is different.

20 chapters · complete

Read the first chapter →

De boom van de belofte A2

The Promise Tree

Noor has a new part-time job in a small second-hand bookshop in Rhenen. In a box of old books she finds a photograph of two children under a big tree by a chapel in the woods, and on it a promise: next year, at the festival, meet me under this tree. Mien, the old woman who runs the shop, says she has never seen them. Noor is sure she is not telling the truth.

20 chapters · complete

Het restaurant aan de overkant B1

The Restaurant Across the Street

Sanne is twenty-four and runs a tiny café of her own in a busy street in Leiden. Her cheese soup is what everyone comes for, and the cheese comes by post from Gerrit, an old cheesemaker in a village in Friesland. This month the parcel doesn't come, Gerrit doesn't answer the phone, and a big, loud chain restaurant has just opened across the street, with a queue round the corner and a young cook who seems to know far too much about Sanne's cheese.

20 chapters · complete

Hotel Kessels B2

The Kessels Hotel

Femke has taken a job at Hotel Kessels, an old family hotel with its own warm spring in the hills of South Limburg, but she is not really there to work: her company wants to buy the hotel, and her boss has sent her to find out what it is worth. From her first night things start going wrong, one after another, and always when it matters most. Someone at the hotel is not what they seem. Then again, neither is Femke.

20 chapters · complete

Het stadje waar de klok stilstond C1

The Town Where the Clock Stood Still

For half a century the clock in the tower of a small hill town in Limburg has stood at three, and the town lives on the story of why: on the night of the great snow, they say, it stopped by itself. Now the mayor has hired Ilse, a clock repairer from the city, to make it go again, and nobody in town seems to want her to. On her first night, the bell of the stopped clock rings once.

20 chapters · complete