Learning Farsi / Persian online

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About a year ago now, during the first French lockdown (March to May 2020), with time on my hands and no interruptions or distractions, I decided to see if I could find decent materials online to learn conversational Persian.

I'd had the same sort of idea about 10 to 15 years ago, when I decided that, holidaying in Greece every summer, I really ought to speak some Greek. But back then, for Greek, I couldn't find anything modern or really conversational, just old-fashioned courses with lots of grammar and the assumption that everything should be written in the Greek alphabet, not transliterated.

I was therefore pretty amazed at the quantity and especially the quality of what's now on offer online, free or at little cost, for conversational Persian.

Two complementary courses

At beginner level, I used two main courses in parallel: the Iran Heritage Foundation's Persian Language Online, and the website Chai and Conversation. 

The Iran Heritage course is centred on three sets of cartoon video clips, 20 at beginner level, 20 at elementary, 20 at intermediate. At beginner level, each clip comes with the text in Persian script, a transliteration (or 'Romanization') of the text, a translation, a glossary, a few short extra dialogues, and some exercises. The latter assume you're learning to read Persian script; I chose not to at the beginning, as I thought it would hold me back. At later levels, there is no transliteration, but I find it quite a useful listening exercise to make my own. All this excellent material is free, but you can donate if you want. I did.

This is a sample clip from Persian Language Online:

It's useful, I think, to have learnt some other languages before coming to Persian with Iran Heritage, as nothing is explained: you have to use your brain and work it out for yourself.

However, on Chai and Conversation's podcasts, Leyla Shams and her acolyte Matt explain everything, and as the progression, at beginner level, is fairly similar to that followed by Iran Heritage, the two courses are nicely complementary: using both, I learnt beginner's Persian faster than I've ever learnt any language before.

The Chai and Conversation podcasts are free. For a small fee, you also have access to PDF files of course materials: glossary, transcription of dialogues and so on. Chai and Conversation offers 50 podcasts in all at beginner level, after which it focuses more on culture and poetry.

Reference resources

Some other useful resources were:

  • this website, by Ali Jahanshiri, especially useful for beginners learning to conjugate verbs, but also for its vocabulary lists. In Persian, the infinitive of a verb leads you easily to the past tense, but you need to learn the 'stems' of the present tense, rather as people learning English have to learn by heart the past tense of irregular verbs. The present stem also gives you access to the imperative and subjunctive: Persian uses subjunctives a lot.
  • Persian Online, Grammar and Resources, from the university of Texas at Austin (home of Chai and Conversation), another useful reference.
  • Yavar Dehghani's Learner's Dictionary. This was the only dictionary I could find that doesn't assume you are learning to read the Persian script: it uses transliterations. I haven't yet found an online dictionary or app that does that: all those I've seen use the script without transliterations. Dehghani's dictionary is quirky: some of the most basic words are mysteriously missing. But it's better than nothing at all.
  • I sometimes also use Abdi Rafiee's Colloquial Persian, which I have on Kindle, as it includes exercises, using transliteration, and comes with CDs good for listening practice.
To learn those tricky present stems of verbs, I used Google Slides, making four slides per verb: first the English term, then the Persian infinitive, the present stem, and the conjugation of the present tense. I also used Google Slides presentations running in a loop as flash-cards to learn vocabulary and expressions.
Above: screenshot from Chai and Conversation

Developing vocabulary

More recently, I've subscribed to Drops, an app on which vocabulary is organised by topic, such as Essentials, Travel, Food and Drink, Shops, and so on. I guess Drops teaches the same words in all languages regardless of local culture, as you quickly learn the Farsi for words like bacon, ham, bok choy, disco, church or cathedral, but not, say, kashk or mosque. But the app allows you to discard words if you don't think you'll need them. I use Drops 15 minutes per day, and I let it use the Persian script (you have the choice), so I'm now gradually learning to read that as well.

Since just before Christmas, I now also have one 90-minute lesson a week with a Persian teacher, via Google Meet.

The result, after one year, is that I'm not too bad at chatting (in transliteration) on WhatsApp or Instagram. But in conversation, I'm still slow as I ponder the best word order and then, usually at the end of the sentence or question, conjugate the verb, often requiring a subjunctive. I really need, now, to get back to Iran and practise. 

Like many things, once we get Covid behind us...

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