Read and Write Persian Language in 7 Days: A Workbook and Step-by-Step Guide

I recently made a friend who speaks Persian. She is learning English but I would like to attempt to learn her language, too. Having years ago made a stab at learning Arabic, I knew it is important to learn the language and the script, too. It's a big jump to read and write from the opposite direction to what I'm used to. It's not much use to learn the English letter phonetic pronunciation of words written in Persian script. It's also kind of discouraging to labor away at the entire alphabet before you can begin to learn words. This Workbook/Guide is perfect for beginning the language. With 2 letters, I was able to write three words! After five letters, it's almost twenty. I find this so encouraging. The book is sensibly and helpfully formatted. The steps are not too big, the actual mini-lessons are digestible. The "how to write steps" are so welcome as is the introductory "how to use this book." As others have noted, it isn't really a 7 day venture. That's just how the book is organized, into 7 sections of letters and concepts.

I had been learning with vocabulary lists so I knew a few words before beginning this book. It is exciting to learn the Persian alphabet for words I already am familiar with. This book methodically teaches the most common letters first along with sentence structure.

I knew nothing about Persian before I started. For the purpose of learning the alphabet, this book accomplishes its purpose. And I really like how letters are introduced starting with the most commonly-used letters rather than just going in alphabetical order. However, the choice of sample vocabulary is very questionable at times. For example, on "Day 2" the author introduces the word for "mother". On "Day 3", when the letter "pe" is introduced, he doesn't bother to complete that thought with the word for "father". Meanwhile, on Day 4 he uses "gravity" and "earth" as vocabulary when introducing the letter "zal". So I can say "gravity" but not "father". Hmmm....not that useful. Also, some of the translations are not great. For example, on Day 4 the author introduces the word "azyat" to mean "tease". According to my Iranian friends and online translation tools, "azyat" really means "annoy" or "harass". As "teasing" can be a playful, friendly action, I feel like "annoy"/"harass" is a much clearer interpretation. Bottom line: This book accomplishes the purpose of familiarization with the alphabet, but it has limited value for vocabulary. Think of it as a primer before digging into another book that's really designed to learn the language. P.S. -- This won't show up as a "verified purchase" because I purchased the book in PDF form direct from the publisher ;-)

Extremely well-laid out lessons. I started knowing absolutely zero and have learned a lot going through it page by page. It teaches you one letter at a time and has sample words and sentences to practice writing to reinforce the material. After you acquire enough letters, it starts trickling in grammar lessons as you continue to go through the rest of the alphabet. Very useful tool for beginners.

perfect simply method for begginers. It helped me a lot. Parally to this author s videos help you clearly to follow step by step . He has a great varity of books as well.

I love the videos and the book accompanies it perfectly. This also helped me get into calligraphy since the book shows the proper way to write.

This text-cum-workbook is a lucid primer for absolute beginners. It explains in sufficient detail the forms assumed by Persian letters depending upon their position in a word and illustrates it with high frequency vocabulary. The title of the book is no tall story and I think the book really serves its purpose very well. There're enough exercises in the book to reinforce the concepts given in a chapter. Obviously, it's more useful to buy the paperback edition rather than the kindle edition of this book. One hopes that the few mistakes in the book will be rectified in the future editions - such as in page 12 it's given that â is to be pronounced like 'u' in 'cut' rather than 'caught'(AmE). However, this has been rectified in page 18 where it's clearly mentioned that it should be pronounced like the long 'a' in father. I highly recommend this book to anyone who's just begun to learn this beautiful language.

Love the book. Easy to understand. It made a huge difference for me. Thank you

This book is a very useful tool to learn Farsi as a beginner. However, the sections to practice writing make the learner write on very very small letters, which makes it a little unpractical. I think 7 days to write and read are not enough and I feel it was defined as such for marketing reasons. Along with the YouTube videos, it's made easy but it goes way too fast, to fit in a 7-day schedule. One week to write and read would be possible for a robot but a human might need a little bit more :) Good work from the author though who tried to make this beautiful language available for non speakers :)

First of all, I was familiar with arabic script so I knew learning to read Farsi script wouldn't be as difficult but I still insisted on a book to get me started in the right direction. No regrets here! It's well written and a complete beginner can really benefit from this book. I skipped the letter writing process so for me it was a breeze in terms of time. However a complete novice at the Farsi/Arabic script should really take their time. The down side to this book for me was the short sentences to read didn't have translation, why? This is a missed opportunity to learn something....I don't memorise or vocabulary and grammer. I prefer to let these things come naturally through reading and listening. The short sentences would have got me excited if there was a translation underneath but I found myself skipping this half way through as I was basically just reading and making noises. Second thing that let me down was dedicating some grammer into this...it isn't necessary at this stage when the reader can barely tell the difference from a be and ne at the stage. Dropping some repetitive vocab would have been ingenious. just my opinion but I wouldn't mark this book down for this. Having said this....it served it's purpose and got me to a level of being able to read Farsi. The author has a youtube page that goes through this book so that I really appreciate as I used this for Day 7 to get an idea of pronunciation of words. It really is different to Arabic and I wasn't too invested into arabic so the change was a warm welcome to my brain. Overall, the author should be proud of this work and you can tell he's patient with exercises and his youtube is at a nice slow pace. I will be buying his conversation book next. There's very scarce material for Farsi but I'm told BBC Persian is a good source for reading.

I bought it for my son who doesn't know Farsi and he likes it very much and he started to learn how to read and write Persian language , and I think is the easiest way for reading and writing for beginners. Thanks

Man kann damit wirklich gut lernen. Nur das man das in 7 Tagen macht ist illosorisch; 7 Wochen wäre realistisch. Trotzdem ein gutes Buch zum persisch lernen.

I like this book a lot. it shows exactly how to pronounce. A friend also thought me a bit from this book.