Read The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes in English — and understand every line.
Read “The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes” by Anonymous in English. Tap any word for its meaning, hear how it sounds, and save it to a memory-driven review schedule.
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DICTIONARY
TRANSLATION
apreciar, atesorar
to feel warm affection for; to hold something dear.
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The opening
How “The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes” begins
Well! your Honour must know, before anything else, that they call me Lazarillo de Tormes, and that I am the son of Thomé Gonçales and Antonia Perez, natives of Tejares, a village near Salamanca.
My birth was in the river Tormes, for which reason I have the river for a surname, and it was in this manner.
My father, whom God pardon, had charge of a flour mill which was on the banks of that river. He was the miller there for over fifteen years, and my mother, being one night taken with me in the mill, she gave birth to me there. So that I may say with truth that I was born in the river.
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Vocabulary
Words to know before you start
The 30 words you will meet most often in “The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes” at level B2 and above, with how many times each one appears.
- master
- blind
- rat
- indulgence
- seek
- thus
- evil
- hunger
- devil
- cloak
- blow
- declare
- remedy
- afterwards
- bunch
- sword
- preach
- presently
- wretched
- stream
- sin
- swear
- beg
- scarcely
- misfortune
- recover
- preserve
- fortune
- desire
- satisfied
The meanings here are the everyday ones. In the reader, tap a word to see the sense this sentence uses.
Grammar
Grammar you will meet in “The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes”
How much of each kind of grammar “The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes” uses, counted in the sentences the Reader marks: per 10,000 words, compared with the other books in the library.
- Relative clauses
- Perfect tenses
- -ing forms and to-infinitives
- Passive voice
- Reported speech
- Modal verbs
- Phrasal verbs
- Conditionals
Constructions to look for
- Past participle clause Next day my master saw both the hole and the damage done to his provisions.
- -ing clause as adverbial (Feeling tired, …) He had a better chance, the food being better and my hunger less.
- Subject relative clause with who/that/which I came here with this cheat who is preaching to you, and he deceived me.
Counted the way the Reader shows it: one card per construction in a sentence. Open the book in the Reader and tap a highlighted phrase to see the rule.
Library
What you get while you read
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Tap to translate
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Save what matters
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Grammar in context
Notable structures light up in the text, with a short explanation tied to the sentence you're reading.
About the book
Why The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes is a great book to read in English
The anonymous 1554 autobiography of a poor boy who survives by serving — and outwitting — a string of stingy masters, from a blind beggar to a penniless squire. The founding work of the picaresque novel, it is short, funny, and told in plain, direct Spanish prose mirrored by the English translation.
On LangOrbit you read “The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes” with a safety net: the translation is one tap away when a sentence runs long, every word opens its meaning in context and can be saved for spaced-repetition review, and the grammar behind the trickier lines is explained right where you meet it.
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The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes
Read “The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes” by Anonymous in English. Tap any word for its meaning, hear how it sounds, and save it to a memory-driven review schedule.
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