How to learn Persian by reading

Persian has one of the world’s great literary traditions: Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, the poetry of Rumi, Saadi, Hafez and Omar Khayyam, and modern writers from Sadegh Hedayat and Forough Farrokhzad to Simin Daneshvar. Iranians still read and quote poets who wrote centuries ago, and a learner who reaches C1 can begin to do the same.

Persian, or Farsi, is spoken in Iran, and as Dari in Afghanistan and Tajik in Tajikistan. It’s an Indo-European language, a distant relative of English: mādar (mother), barādar (brother), setāre (star), nām (name). Its grammar is friendly, with no grammatical gender, no case endings and regular verb endings, though each verb has two stems to learn. The challenge is the script, and what it leaves out.

What makes Persian hard to read

• The script. Persian uses a form of the Arabic alphabet with four extra letters for Persian sounds (پ p, چ ch, ژ zh, گ g), 32 letters in all, written right to left and joined within words.
• Short vowels you don’t see. Ordinary text writes consonants and long vowels only. The same letters can spell different words: کرد is kard (“did”) or kord (“Kurd”); گل is gol (“flower”) or gel (“mud”). Context, and knowing the words, tells you which.
• The invisible ezafe. A short -e links a noun to an adjective or to its owner, and it’s usually not written: کتاب من is ketāb-e man, “my book,” and خانهٔ بزرگ is khāne-ye bozorg, “the big house,” where the small mark over the final ه is one of the few places the ezafe is written. Supplying it as you read is a core Persian skill.
• Several letters for one sound. Because of borrowed Arabic words, ز, ذ, ض and ظ all sound like z; س, ص and ث all sound like s; ت and ط are both t. Spelling has to be learned word by word.
• Compound verbs. Most verbs are a noun or adjective plus a light verb: کار کردن (kār kardan, “to work,” literally “work do”), تصمیم گرفتن (tasmim gereftan, “to decide,” “decision take”), زمین خوردن (zamin khordan, “to fall,” “ground eat”).
• Word order. The verb comes last, and را (rā) marks a definite object: ketāb rā khāndam, “I read the book.”
• The half-space. Persian joins some prefixes and suffixes to a word without connecting the letters, as in می‌روم (miravam, “I go”) and کتاب‌ها (ketābhā, “books”). It looks like a gap, but it isn’t one.
• Written and spoken Persian. Books use the written standard, but everyday Tehran speech shortens it: mikhāham (“I want”) becomes mikhām, ast (“is”) becomes -e, and nān (“bread”) becomes nun. Dialogue in modern fiction often uses the spoken forms.

Starting from zero? Our guide to learning a new script covers the Arabic script, which Persian uses with four extra letters.

Persian reading at each level

The CEFR levels, as they appear in Persian:

• A2, elementary. Short sentences in the present and simple past, everyday compound verbs, را for objects, the ezafe in common phrases, and the subjunctive after خواستن (“to want”).
• B1, intermediate. The present perfect and past progressive, the subjunctive after more verbs and conjunctions, relative clauses with که, and more compound verbs.
• B2, upper intermediate. The past perfect, the passive with شدن, long sentences with several clauses, and more Arabic loanwords in formal writing.
• C1, advanced. Close to the original, lightly condensed, with a literary vocabulary. C2 is the complete book.

See CEFR levels explained for the scale itself.

The Arabian Nights at A2 and at B2

The frame story of the Thousand and One Nights, with its Persian king and his storyteller bride, written for this page at two levels:

A2

شهرزاد هر شب برای پادشاه یک قصه تعریف می‌کند. قصه تا صبح تمام نمی‌شود. پادشاه می‌خواهد آخر قصه را بداند.‏

Every night, Scheherazade tells the king a story. The story isn’t finished by morning. The king wants to know how it ends.

B2

شهریار که از خیانت همسرش زخم خورده بود، تصمیم گرفته بود دیگر به هیچ زنی اعتماد نکند، اما قصه‌های شهرزاد کم‌کم دلش را نرم کرد.‏

Shahryar, who had been wounded by his wife’s betrayal, had decided never again to trust any woman, but little by little Scheherazade’s stories softened his heart.

The A2 text uses a compound verb, تعریف کردن (ta’rif kardan, “to tell,” literally “description do”), an unwritten ezafe in آخر قصه (ākhar-e qesse, “the end of the story”), and the subjunctive بداند (bedānad, “know”) after “wants.” The B2 sentence adds a relative clause with که, the past perfect زخم خورده بود (zakhm khorde bud, literally “had eaten a wound”), a double negative (هیچ زنی… نکند, “no woman… not trust”), and the possessive ending ـش, “his,” in همسرش and دلش. Notice too that the plural “stories” takes a singular verb, کرد, as inanimate plurals often do in Persian.

How to practice reading Persian every day

1. Read with the narrator. Play a section and keep your eyes on the highlighted word. The narration supplies the vowels and the ezafe the page leaves out, which is exactly what you need to learn to supply yourself.
2. Read the same lines aloud. Say a few sentences after the narrator, ezafe and all. It trains you to hear the invisible.
3. Tap only what blocks you. If the sentence makes sense, keep going. Words you half-know become clear with each new meeting.
4. Reread. On a second pass, try reading a paragraph aloud before playing it, and check yourself against the narrator.

Stephen Krashen argued that we acquire language by understanding messages in it, slightly beyond what we already know (Krashen 1982, Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition). Reading Persian at your level, with audio, is input of exactly that kind: the story is clear enough to follow, and each page shows you the same words, endings and patterns until you supply the missing vowels without thinking. More in comprehensible input, reading while listening and extensive reading.

Classics to start with

• The Arabian Nights has Persian roots: scholars trace its frame story to a lost Persian collection, Hezār Afsān, “A Thousand Tales.” Its short, self-contained stories suit A2 and B1.
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is short and playful, with lots of dialogue, at A2 or B1.
• Treasure Island is fast and full of action, an ideal first novel.
• The Count of Monte Cristo is a long, gripping revenge story for B2.
• Journey to the Center of the Earth follows one expedition from start to finish, easy to follow at A2.

Reading Persian in Lexo

Persian is fully narrated in Lexo, which helps with a script that leaves out its vowels. The whole book is read aloud, with different voices for different characters, and the text highlights word by word as it’s read, so you hear the vowels and the ezafe the page doesn’t show. Every word can also be played on its own. Pages read right to left, and they turn right to left too.

Tap any word and a card shows what it means in that sentence, its base form and its part of speech, so کتاب‌هایش, “his or her books,” leads back to کتاب. The card also spells the word out in Latin letters, short vowels included, which tells you whether کرد in that sentence is kard or kord. If the word belongs to a phrase, such as a compound verb, the card explains the phrase as a whole, and the whole sentence is translated into English. Words you want to keep go into your Words list, and sentence-by-sentence mode shows one sentence at a time with its audio and translation.

Every book comes at five levels, A2 to C2, chosen book by book. If you’re the first reader of a book in Persian at your level, Lexo writes the edition: chapter 1 is ready in a few minutes, the rest follows while you read, and you keep a dated “First edition” mark. Books download for offline reading, and you can adjust the type size and theme for comfortable reading of the script, with Paper, Sepia, Slate and Night to choose from. There’s no account to create.

Persian shares its script and many words with Arabic, lent many words to Hindi and Turkish, and is a distant Indo-European cousin of English.

Lexo is coming soon to the App Store for iPhone and iPad. Get notified at launch.