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Learning spoken Persian/Farsi? | ||
Tags: Farsi/Persian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| EricaRC Newbie United States Joined 4764 days ago 16 posts - 16 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 1 of 6 28 April 2011 at 12:06am | IP Logged | ||
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How hard is it to learn spoken Persian/Farsi, for somwone who speaks English and French? How long will it take to reach fluency?
What are some good resources to use to teach myself? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6225 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 6 28 April 2011 at 12:35am | IP Logged | ||
The Assimil course is fairly decent. There are also a number of good Persian readers from various publishers once you get more advanced; a lot of them are hard to get, but there are enough options that you will be able to find something. Persian music is also readily available online (and I don't mean pirated music). This forum also has quite a lot of threads that mention useful resources for learning Persian. How hard is it to learn? Hard to say - how hard is any language to learn? The overall grammar is fairly simple, for a natural language, though there are tricky subtleties in literary language. The phonetic system will be quite straightforward. Vocabulary will be almost all new to you - don't expect to have anywhere near as many similarities as you find between English and French. How long will it take to reach fluency? Depends on what you do. Months or years, like any other language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tbone Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4777 days ago 92 posts - 132 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 3 of 6 28 April 2011 at 6:55am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm also in the process of rounding up stuff for a try at spoken Persian.
Wikiversity has a roundup of stuff available on the web, including the easypersian.com website: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Persian/Websites 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6735 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 4 of 6 28 April 2011 at 11:48am | IP Logged | ||
I'd like to comment on two of the resources listed here: easypersian.com, unfortunately, is not very good for spoken Persian. The focus is on written Persian, and he doesn't introduce the spoken equivalents. Also, I don't find the lessons to be very well organized: rather obscure vocabulary (like "to burst a balloon") is introduced before simpler and more useful vocabulary, and the lessons are very heavily grammar-focused so that you'll have several lessons explaining the mechanics of how to make a sentence but no explanation of how to say "how are you?" or "I'm from ---" or "how much is this?" or anything else that is generally taught to beginners. Think of it as a manual to Persian grammar with a lot of isolated example sentences. The Iraj Bashiri course focuses on spoken Persian, so I was able to learn a lot of neat things like "this particle is generally pronounced XX in colloquial speech in the area around Tehran". The downside to this course, however, is that it apparently has a lot of outdated language that is sure to get you laughed at (according to a Persian speaker on the Unilang forum). Additionally: Pimsleur has a course which may be available at your local library. The Assimil course is available only in French. By all accounts it's not bad, but not one of their best, either. It uses both the Perso-Arabic and Latin alphabets. The TY and Colloquial courses have low reviews on Amazon. I've been saving up for a video course called Spider Farsi [spiderfarsi.com] which is definitely geared toward spoken Persian. It's advertised on the creator's YouTube channel [farsiyadbegirim]. The course is really expensive and I can't find any reviews for it on this forum or on the web, but I enjoyed his YouTube lessons very much (especially those on writing the alphabet) and his course seems to cover everything I want to know. If I end up buying it, I'll write a full review here. Finally, Living Languages makes a course (text + audio) called Spoken World Farsi, which seems to be popular and dialogue-driven, but which reviewers on Amazon say is difficult and not very good for learning the alphabet (for some reason, all of the courses I've come across seem to have this same shortcoming. The letters in print are very tiny, and like any alphabet, very different from handwriting, so it's a mystery why they always try to "teach" a letter just by showing it to us in 12 pt font... at that size, at least to a beginner, they all look the same!) Edited by Lucky Charms on 28 April 2011 at 11:51am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tbone Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4777 days ago 92 posts - 132 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 5 of 6 28 April 2011 at 5:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks, that's helpful. I do have the Pimsleur but, as you probably know, they offer Persian only to level I. It'll be a
good start for pronunciation. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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