Where can I find free short stories for beginners in Spanish, French, German and Italian?

Mostly A2 to B1, not A1. The free stories fall into two groups. Old school readers were written or edited for English-speaking students, and they start simply. Everything else is literature written for native readers, and its level was set by hand by our team, as explained on How were the levels set? Even the easiest free original is denser than a book written to a word list: Tomás de Iriarte’s Fábulas literarias (A2) uses 3,959 different word forms in 14,714 words, while Olly Richards’ paid beginners’ books control their language to a level that includes the 1,000 most frequent words.

• Spanish Tales for Beginners, edited by E. C. Hills: short tales and sketches of Spanish life by nineteenth-century authors, with a few poems and verse fables, published as a reader for students.
• Lecturas fáciles con ejercicios by Lawrence A. Wilkins and Max A. Luria (A2): an old school reader with exercises, 61,857 words in all.
• Spanish Short Stories, edited by E. C. Hills and Louise Reinhardt: stories of Spanish life from around 1900, arranged in order of difficulty.
• Fábulas literarias by Tomás de Iriarte (A2): 76 fables, almost all in verse, about 190 words each.
• Cuentos de amor by Emilia Pardo Bazán (B1): 43 love stories of about 1,500 words, the shortest on average of the Spanish prose collections in our table.
• Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte by Horacio Quiroga (B1, 1917): 18 stories of about 2,800 words.

• Contes et légendes, 1re partie by H. A. Guerber: French fairy tales and legends as a first reader, told simply and with a lot of repetition. It opens with Les Trois Ours.
• Riquet à la Houppe by Charles Perrault (A2): a single fairy tale of 2,196 words with 617 different word forms, the shortest book in our whole table.
• Fables de La Fontaine, Tome premier (A2): the 22 fables of Book I and La Fontaine’s preface, 6,910 words. They are seventeenth-century verse, so expect old forms.
• Dix contes modernes, edited by H. A. Potter: ten stories by ten authors, among them Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet, published as a reader.
• Boule de Suif (12 stories) and Le Horla (14 stories) by Guy de Maupassant (B1): both average about 3,000 words a story.

• Märchen und Erzählungen für Anfänger by H. A. Guerber, in two parts (first, second): simple tales built on repeated sentence patterns, starting with Jakobs Haus.
• Der Struwwelpeter by Heinrich Hoffmann (A2): cautionary tales for children in rhyme, 2,988 words in all.
• Deutsche Märchen by the Brothers Grimm (A2): a 1921 printing of a selection first published in 1911, with Der Froschkönig, Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten and Das tapfere Schneiderlein. Start with the tales you already know.
• Das Urteil by Franz Kafka (B1): one story of 4,060 words, the shortest German prose in our table.
• Immensee by Theodor Storm (A2) and In der Strafkolonie by Kafka (B1): single long stories of about 10,000 words, one to two evenings each.

• First Italian Readings, edited by Benjamin L. Bowen (A2): graded selections for beginners. They open with retellings of familiar tales such as Il gatto cogli stivali (Puss in Boots) and Cenerentola.
• Vecchie storie d’amore by Adolfo Albertazzi (B1, 1895): 12 stories of about 2,300 words.
• Fedele ed altri racconti by Antonio Fogazzaro (B1): seven stories with verse interludes between them, about 5,000 words a story.

No. Short Stories in Spanish for Beginners and the French, German and Italian books in the same series are sold by Teach Yourself, a Hachette imprint, as paperback, ebook and audiobook. Each has eight stories. The publisher maps the French, German and Italian books to A2–B1, and its UK page for the Spanish book says it is written for students “from beginner to intermediate level”. It says the language of each book is controlled to a level that includes the 1,000 most frequent words. So “for beginners” means learners who know the basics, about the same range as the free stories on this page. The difference is that the paid books are written to a word list, and the French, German and Spanish books give a glossary with each story.

Sometimes. LibriVox volunteers record books that are in the public domain, and the recordings are free and in the public domain too. Not every story has a recording, so search the LibriVox catalogue for the title or the author. Hearing the text while you read it shows you how the words sound.

Yes, in the United States. Project Gutenberg marks the books on this page as public domain in the USA, and you can download each one as an EPUB or Kindle file without paying or signing up. Copyright terms differ by country, so if you live elsewhere, check that the author is out of copyright where you are. The old readers are school books more than a century old: their notes are in English and some of their language is dated.