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lengua
Senior Member
United States
polyglottery.wordpre
Joined 6473 days ago
549 posts - 595 votes 
Studies: French, Italian, Spanish, German
| Message 17 of 44 03 September 2006 at 12:30pm | IP Logged |
I'm thinking of completing the Pimsleur Quick and Easy Farsi to see how much it covers.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743525434?v=g lance
1 person has voted this message useful
| Alijsh
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Iran
jahanshiri.ir/
Joined 6411 days ago
149 posts - 167 votes
1 sounds
Speaks: Persian*, Spanish, French, English
Studies: German, Italian
| Message 18 of 44 10 October 2006 at 1:21am | IP Logged |
Dear Ardaschir, let me thank you for such nice information.
Concerning the number of speakers: The population of Iran is now some 75,000,000 from which only one million of them might don't know the language well or not at all. One million is too much. Just count and see how much is one million to understand me. In general, the children are natively grown up bilingual. That is, for example, an Azeri family speaks in Persian with their children from birth as well as in Turkish. This way, they speak both languages without any accent and as perfectly as a native.
Persian is official language in Afghanistan and Tajikistan and is also spoken in Pakistan, India, Iraq, Bahrain etc. The written Persian has no specific difference in any of these countries. That is, a novel, poem, etc. which is written in Afghanistan can be read and understood by any Iranian and vice versa. The differences are limited to spoken form.
I don't know how many speakers we have in other countries but based on Wikipedia it ends up to 110 million which seems valid to me.
Edited by Alijsh on 23 October 2006 at 11:20am
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| bohy1b
Newbie
Australia
Joined 6401 days ago
14 posts - 14 votes
| Message 19 of 44 21 October 2006 at 12:19am | IP Logged |
It is in fact pronounced "Farsi" and not "Parsi" in Iran. You pretty much read it as you right it, with an F. Although you are right, it would have originally been called "parsi" or something similiar. Same as many other words such as "Fil" and "Pil" which means elephant.
Having said that, you probably speak the language a lot better than I do, considering the sort of literature you have tackled. Hafez aint easy, not even for locals.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Alijsh
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Iran
jahanshiri.ir/
Joined 6411 days ago
149 posts - 167 votes
1 sounds
Speaks: Persian*, Spanish, French, English
Studies: German, Italian
| Message 20 of 44 21 October 2006 at 12:56am | IP Logged |
bohy1b wrote:
| It is in fact pronounced "Farsi" and not "Parsi" in Iran. You pretty much read it as you right it, with an F. |
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You're right. We don't normally say Pârsi but Fârsi. That's why Farsi has been recently introduced to other languages and not Parsi.
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Poems of Hâfez are relatively easy for native speakers. His book of poems are found in many houses and are read daily by many. His poems are still picked for songs.
Edited by Alijsh on 21 October 2006 at 4:10am
1 person has voted this message useful
| orion
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6810 days ago
622 posts - 678 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Russian
| Message 21 of 44 23 October 2006 at 8:38am | IP Logged |
Here's a cool site I found:
http://www.easypersian.com/
It has a section about learning the alphabet, which is really interesting. There are some mp3 sound files there also. The grammar doesn't seem nearly as bad as I had always imagined...
1 person has voted this message useful
| Alijsh
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Iran
jahanshiri.ir/
Joined 6411 days ago
149 posts - 167 votes
1 sounds
Speaks: Persian*, Spanish, French, English
Studies: German, Italian
| Message 22 of 44 23 October 2006 at 10:04am | IP Logged |
Yes, it's a very good site.
The Persian grammar is easy and the script is not as hard as it seems. If you follow lessons you easily learn it. I know people who have started learning Persian from this site. easypersian has forum so if you had any question you can post it there.
Take a look at Links & Internet Resources : Persian and Iran. You might find some useful links.
In USA you can easily find an Iranian. It can make learning easier.
The site of University of Texas at Austin has also materials.
Edited by Alijsh on 23 October 2006 at 11:28am
2 persons have voted this message useful
| bohy1b
Newbie
Australia
Joined 6401 days ago
14 posts - 14 votes
| Message 23 of 44 24 October 2006 at 8:45am | IP Logged |
I dont agree that Hafez's writings are considered relatively easy for native speakers. They would be considered in my opinion one of the more difficult writing of that era. They require a certain level of literary understanding to fully grasp.
1 person has voted this message useful
| dip
Diglot
Newbie
Joined 5397 days ago
7 posts - 10 votes
Speaks: Romanian*, English
Studies: Italian, Persian
| Message 24 of 44 27 July 2009 at 2:31pm | IP Logged |
ProfArguelles wrote:
Although I have a passionate love for and attachment to many languages, still, if I were pressed to choose one all time favorite, it would probably be Persian. Indeed, �Ardaschir� is the name of the poet-philosopher-king who founded the Sassanian dynasty in 226 AD and it is the Middle Persian version of the Old Persian �Artaxerxes,� which is perhaps a bit more familiar to readers of Herodotus.
Although I have never yet had the privilege and the challenge of conversing in it, and although I still have a ways to go before I will be able to read it with the same speed and facility that I can read most European languages, still I have already attained my main goal of being able to access its literature in the original with both pleasure and understanding, so I am in a position to offer some information that may be useful in providing a language profile for users of this site.
Where to begin? Well, there is little consensus on the number of speakers that this language has, and two main internet sources of linguistic information, Ethnologue and Wikipedia, differ by more than 50 million in their estimates, the former giving it a paltry 22 million, the later 75 million. Elsewhere I have even seen figures exceeding 100 million, but the majority of claims are in the region of 50-60 million. In any case, Persian is the national language of Iran and all educated Iranians know it through their schooling, but it is actually only the native language of about 1/3 to 1/2 of the population, the rest speaking various smaller Iranian languages or indeed major Turkic languages such as Azerbaijani as their mother tongues. Persian is also an official language of Afghanistan, where it is known as Dari, and of Tajikistan, where it is known as Tajiki (and where it is written in Cyrillic instead of Arabic script).
In centuries past it was the official, court, or literary language of many more places ranging from Turkey through India. Persian is sometimes called �the French of the East� in reference to its semi-classical status and its role as an international vehicle of thought and communication and, after Arabic, there is no doubt that it is the 2nd most important language in all of Islamic civilization. As a cultural vehicle it is certainly one of the oldest and most important languages in all of history, and it is often claimed that there is more literature, or at least more poetry, in Persian than in any other language. Although there is no way to verify such a claim, anyone familiar with the literary history and tradition of the language can understand why it is made, and Western poets of the stature of Goethe have acknowledged the preeminence of its masters. The most wonderful and important thing is that all of its literary gems produced down the centuries are accessible to any modern learner of the language, for although it changed a great deal over the first 2,500 years of its 3,500 year documented history, it has changed extremely little in the past 1000+ years. Thus, anyone who can read a modern story is also in a position to read the classical literature of the golden age of roughly 800 � 1200 AD.
Well, how hard is it to learn Persian? Speakers of Arabic, which has had a formative influence on Persian, and speakers of Turkic, Indic and other languages upon which Persian has in turn had a formative influence will find much that is very familiar and thus for them learning Persian should be on the easy side of linguistic chores. For speakers of English or of any other European language, however, for all that Persian shares their common Indo-European roots, it is very much an exotic language belonging to another cultural circle, and learning such a language is always a different game altogether from learning another language that shares both a common culture and a common root. That said, as far as exotic languages are concerned, for speakers of English and other European languages, Persian is probably one of the least difficult.
Phonetically speaking I do not believe Persian to be challenging for speakers of any European language � depending on your precise background, there may be a trouble spot here or there, but I do not think there are any sounds in Persian that are not found in most of the major European languages.
Grammatically speaking, Persian is �objectively� a very easy language � that is to say, if we could put all the formal grammar (rules and exceptions to rules, charts, tables, paradigms, etc.) of various languages on cards of the same size, Persian would require far fewer than the overwhelming majority of natural languages. Persian has evolved very far from its highly inflecting Indo-European roots, as much so or perhaps even more than has English in the West. Grammatical gender is completely gone (no separate pronouns for he and she), and while there are different verb endings according to person and number, this dispenses with the general use of pronouns. The only outstanding irregularity in the language is that most common verbs use different roots altogether in the present and in the past. All told, getting a basic grasp of the structure of the language should be a comparatively easy task for anyone, no matter what their background.
When it comes to vocabulary acquisition, Persian�s Indo-European roots can immediately be felt in its very core vocabulary, especially names of close family members, personal pronouns, and numbers. However, after that and apart from modern French loan words, things are really pretty foreign. I don�t want to give a false statistic for the percentage of Arabic loan words in Persian, but it is extremely high, in the range of 50% and perhaps even more. Even the native Indo-Iranian words have a long and separate developmental history that generally masks their relationship to European words. So, unless you know Arabic, you really do have a lot of words to learn before you can begin to find your way around in Persian, though there is nothing particularly difficult about the task � indeed, one of the reasons I love this language is that I find that its words often sound to my ears marvelously as if they �should� mean pretty much what they do mean, and I never had to have any recourse to outright memorization, but built up my lexicon by first internalizing recorded dialogues and then through extensive reading.
I cannot give a blanket answer for roughly how many hours it would take to gain a decent fluency in spoken Persian, for that really depends on your linguistic background, your general degree of language-learning experience, and how intensively and intelligently you work at it, but I can say that (again unless you already known Arabic), you can certainly be speaking Persian well long before you can hope to read it rapidly. All in all, if gaining oral communicative skills in Persian is probably an �easy� task considering that it is an exotic language, attaining literacy is unfortunately a much harder one. Why? Because Persian uses the Arabic alphabet, which shows consonants only and not vowels. This kind of alphabet is appropriate for a vowel-poor Semitic language with a root-consonantal basis and regularly recurring lexical structure, but it is not so well suited to Indo-European languages like Persian, which have more vowels and lack this kind of basic structure. Although it facilitates reading, writing Persian is further complicated by the fact that Arabic has far more sounds than Persian, namely different kinds or qualities of t�s, d�s, z�s, s�s, and the like. Persian has kept the original Arabic spelling in the words that it has borrowed, but it has leveled all these sounds into only one variant, with the result that there are many different ways of representing the same sound. Furthermore, I have since discovered that while Arabic texts for general consumption are not written with vowels, books for children and adolescents, as well as important classical texts and a good many serious modern scholarly texts, do have them. In contrast, I have never found a single Persian text, not even one for very young children, that has its vowels written in. Without the vowels, you get the outline of a word only, not its full sound, so you may learn to recognize what a given shape means in a given context, but you won�t know how to pronounce it correctly and so add it to your active vocabulary. Once you do know how a given word sounds, writing it in this way is not a problem, but it is hard indeed for non-natives who do not get these sounds from their living environment. I can barely fathom how autodidacts got over this hurdle in the past, but happily in our day and age, you can surmount it the same way that I did, namely by listening to ample quantities of recorded materials while simultaneously reading the written text. One of the easiest and best things about learning Persian is that, because of its rich cultural and literary heritage, there is not only much learning material available for it, there is also a considerable amount of textual material recorded for native speakers that you can purchase in the form of CD-ROM�s. I have learned to read Persian as well as I have by acquiring and listening to dozens and dozens of hours of Firdousi�s epic Shahname, the Boostan and the Gulistan of Sa�di, and the poems of Hafez and Rumi while simultaneously looking at the texts.
Apart from its own inherent value, I would most heartily recommend Persian to any would-be polyglot as perhaps the ultimate gateway language. A knowledge of Persian would certainly open the door to all other living Indo-Iranian languages such as Pashto, Kurdish, and Baluchi, as well as the various and sundry minority languages of Iran, many of which are probably just non-standardized Persian dialects. In fact, there is such a dearth of materials for studying any of these other languages that I imagine going through a solid knowledge of Persian would be your only way to get at them. You can also swim backwards diachronically to get at Pahlavi or Middle Persian, which is not all that different from Modern Persian, though it lacks its infusion of Arabic words and is written in a different script, and then further back to Old (Western) Persian proper, the language of many extant historical inscriptions and the direct ancestor of Modern Persian or to Avestan or �Old Eastern Persian,� the language of Zoroaster and the Zend Avesta, which is extremely close to Sanskrit. Persian does not just open the door to other Indo-Iranian languages, but also to languages from other families such as Urdu, Turkish, and Armenian, into all of which it has poured its influence over the centuries. Persian even paves the path to Arabic, for it is much easier to learn and although this is in a certain sense swimming against the tide as well, if you learn Persian first, you will build up a considerable storehouse of Arabic words�and not just because Persian has borrowed from Arabic, for although there is a massive lexical trade imbalance between the two languages, still Persian probably has the honor of being the single largest source of foreign loan words in Arabic, which is traditionally a very purist language.
As I mentioned above, there is a great amount of learning material, much of it high quality for the study of Persian. Far and away the best book for getting started is Farhad Sobhani�s �Persisches Lehr- und Lesebuch� (Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1962), which was still available from Amazon.de last time I checked, and which comes with some invaluable if not lengthy recorded material as well. Another great way to get started would be with Assimil�s �Le Persan sans Peine� (Dominique Halbout et Mohammed-Hossein Kareini, 2003), which, once edited as I described in another post, has over two hours of very high quality dialogues, albeit spoken throughout in a rather all too clear and lugubrious didactic pace. Abi Rafiee�s �Colloquial Persian� (Routledge, 2001) teaches contemporary Tehrani, also with good but short tapes. Both Bozorg Alavi & Manfred Lorenz �Langenscheidts Praktisches Lehrbuch, Persisch� and Wheeler S. Thackston �An Introduction to Persian� (Ibex, 1993) provide extremely thorough and complete guides to the language suitable for those with some academic linguistic background. The latter even comes with tapes, but although they are 9 in number (and cost about $90), they are redundantly recorded with asinine instructions such as �listen, but don�t repeat� now listen and repeat� and long silent gaps, so that if you rerecord the useable materials in a more user friendly fashion, you get less than a single hour all told. Another classic reference is Lambston�s �Persian,� and even more comprehensive, and far more interesting as its texts are more literary in nature, is W. St. Caire Tisdall�s somewhat inappropriately named �Modern Persian Conversation Grammar,� originally published over a century ago but still generally available. These older works are really indispensable for serious students, but they must be used with a bit of caution. I wrote above that Persian has changed very little in the past 1200 or so years, but it has changed in one important respect at some point within the past 50-odd years. Persian etiquette used to forbid the use of 1st and 2nd person pronouns, mandating such substitutes as �your slave� in the first case and �your Excellency� in the second, and however rude and offensive the sound of �I� and �you� might have been in the past, surely these locutions would sound even more absurd in today�s Iran. Well, if you can persevere through some or all of these courses and make it to the intermediate level, you will find that bilingual books are not rare things in Persian, and also that a wide variety of Persian Readers have been published over the decades, and though most of them are now out of print, they are probably readily available in used book shops and in libraries. Of such books that are in print, Michael Hillmann has published a number with Dunwoody Press, all of which come with accompanying recordings; the one I am most familiar with being his �Persian Fiction Reader� of short stories written since the Revolution, which is indeed excellent, though the sound quality of its tapes is disappointing. Better yet, if you can acquire and access it, is К.И. Поляков и А.А. Носырев �Учебник персидск
86;го языка, основной курс� (Издатель 089;кий Дом �Муравей-Г&# 1072;йд� Москва, 2000), which comes with close to four hours of interesting readings recorded in a high-quality format. At the back of this book are advertisements for similar beginning courses by the same authors which are probably of the same quality.
To close, my thoughts about the name of this language: it has always been known as Persian, and in scholarly circles it still is, but for some reason in the past few decades it has become increasingly common to call it Farsi, which is indeed the Persian word for �Persian.� However, I think we would all agree that it would sound both stupid and pretentious, when speaking English, to say �I know Deutsch so well that I can read Nederlands too and even understand some Svenska and Dansk, and I�m also pretty good at Fran�ais and Espa�ol, and now I�m starting to learn Русский.� Why should a different standard apply for Persian? It shouldn�t and it doesn�t and it really sounds just as odd to call Persian Farsi, though you are certainly not to blame if you do it because that is what you have always heard others doing. I don�t know what force is driving this change, and the only justification for it that I can imagine would be sensitivity to the feelings of native speakers if they for some reason objected to the use of Persian, but I don�t believe that they do. Visit online bookshops and other sites both in Iran and abroad and you will see that they regard themselves as purveyors of Persian literature. To quote from the online Wikipedia: �Persian, the more widely used and official name of the language in English, is the Hellenized form of the native term Parsi. Farsi is the Arabicized form of Parsi and its use in the English language is very recent. Native Persian speakers typically call it "Parsi" in modern usage� The Academy of Persian Language and Literature as well as most linguists and lexicographers, believe that "Farsi" is not the appropriate term used for the Persian language in English. "Farsi" is actually the Arabicized form of "Parsi", due to a lack of the /p/ phoneme in Standard Arabic�� So, if anyone has any legitimate reason for using the new term, please provide it for discussion. If not, let�s drop the Farsi business once and for all, get rid of references to it on our site (administrator, please begin by changing the name of this topic), and try to encourage others to use the correct term: Persian. |
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Thanks for your wonderful comments..
now take this into consideration http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywAsoOCI2PE
and you'll have all the reasons to start learning persian and not arabic.
I also never thought they were closely related. Ok, persian has many borrowed arabic words as equivalents, share the same script... the neighborhood influences are obvious, not considerable, so we can't make references as an arabadized Indo-European language because both are very very different sounding languages to any ears. Anyone actually know how much different the modern persian pronunciation is from the old/middle persian? Any resources for spoken avestan?
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