administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7376 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map
| Message 9 of 44 22 February 2005 at 10:53am | IP Logged |
Dear Ardaschir,
Thank you for your invaluable presentation of the Persian language. I apologize for the lack of response on your excellent post but since this language is unknown to me (apart from a Farsi friend) I had nothing to contribute except for my appreciation and interest.
If you look at the number of views for this thread, you'll see that many people went to read your post even if few ventured to comment on such an authoritative post.
The profile for Persian will be added in the near future and this thread will be used as the source. If you agree, I will probably ask you a few complementary questions at that time for the purpose of the profile.
My problem now is that I am quite pleased with the new profiles for the languages I speak, however for other languages it is harder to make a good text.
Edited by administrator on 22 February 2005 at 11:00am
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mahyar Newbie Canada Joined 7201 days ago 34 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French
| Message 10 of 44 11 March 2005 at 12:14am | IP Logged |
What are the best resources for reading and writing the persian alphabet? Is there a book that is accessable to english readers (or in pure farsi if it is easy to follow) on learning to write the alphabet?
Also, what is the best english to persian, persian to english dictionary? It would be really useful for our entire family (my grandmother doesn't speak english too well).
Edited by mahyar on 11 March 2005 at 12:36am
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ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7256 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes
| Message 11 of 44 11 March 2005 at 6:24am | IP Logged |
Do I correctly gather that you are of Iranian descent? Well then, the learning process will be quite different if you have a cultural background in the language. I am not, so I don't have any actual experience with the kind of materials you are seeking, but I know that they do abound on such sites as the Persian Shopping Mall or Dastchin or Ibex publishers or Iran Books or Iranbookshop.com. Likewise, the kind of dictionary I need and use is probably rather different from the one your grandmother would need, but still I was told that the best are written by Abbas Aryanpur and Manoocher Aryanpur, who have a whole series of sizes. I've never seen a good Persian/English - English/Persian dictionary in one volume -- usually you have to get them in two separate tomes.
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mahyar Newbie Canada Joined 7201 days ago 34 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French
| Message 12 of 44 11 March 2005 at 7:13pm | IP Logged |
Your right in guessing that I am of iranian descent. I was born in raised in canada although and only one of my parents were persian, so I didn't get the oppertunity to learn the language too well at all (and I cannot read or write it). So resources that may be good for you (subtracting my lack of lingustic experience) could be good for me too.
Please tell me, how did you learn to read and write persian? The leads you've given me have been helpful, but I really want know all that I can get.
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ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7256 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes
| Message 13 of 44 15 March 2005 at 3:58am | IP Logged |
If you want to read and write Persian, then what you have to do is read and write it a great deal, a cummulative total of years in fact. I already noted that one reason Persian is an alluring tongue is that there is so much accessible material to read in it. When you feel that you can break away from teaching manuals, you have many recourses.
First and foremost, you should probably go through some graded readers that have special vocabulary for each passage.
After that, you can begin with bilingual texts, first comparing sentence by sentence, then paragraph by paragraph, then page by page, etc. Here you can get some wonderful audio help from CD-ROM's of the classics. For instance, you can get a full twelve hours of the Boostan-e Saadi on CD and while you listen to it, you can simultaneously be reading a bilingual translation of it.
After you have done this, you can turn to general readers that do not have vocabulary specifically keyed to each section, but which at least have a general vocabulary for the book that will save you from wading fruitlessly through a larger dictionary.
When you have gone through some of these, you are probably ready to start reading children's literature or Persian translations of works that you already know. The trick at this point is to simply read, read, read as much as you can, even if you do not have complete understanding. As long as you grasp what is going on globally and you persevere, you will eventually start to acquire vocabulary from context, which is much more efficient than looking up everything in a dictionary.
You really shouldn't have recourse to a dictionary until you repeatedly find yourself stubling over the same word, until you know the word, in essence, but you don't know what it means.
Likewise for writing, simply practice copying out pages. When you have done several hundred, you should have it.
There is no easy road to any language, just systematically sustained endeavor over a period of years.
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Polyglot2005 Senior Member United States Joined 7188 days ago 184 posts - 185 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 14 of 44 21 March 2005 at 1:21am | IP Logged |
A good farsi resource is:
Contemporary Spoken Persian: developed by Mehdi Marashi. It is available at audioforum.com and probably other places too.
Edited by Polyglot2005 on 21 March 2005 at 2:50am
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ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7256 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes
| Message 15 of 44 21 March 2005 at 2:39am | IP Logged |
Thank you for adding this, it is important to list all available materials. I believe this book, however, does not introduce the Persian script at all but rather presents everything in transliteration, so it is probably not what Mahyar is after.
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merrycate Newbie United States Joined 6658 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Studies: Japanese
| Message 16 of 44 02 September 2006 at 9:44am | IP Logged |
Ardaschir, as someone with a newfound interest in Persian, I want to thank you sincerely for your in-depth posts. I'm really blown away by your extensive knowledge and I think I've learned a lot!
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