- Learn the Persian alphabet which opens your way to not only Persian, but also Arabic, Urdu, Kurdish, etc.
- Study more than 30 lessons on Persian grammar with audio!
- Use the interactive lessons to strengthen your vocabulary!
- Test yourself after each lesson!
- Learn colloquial Persian, as it is spoken in Tehran!
- Use the pictorial vocabulary lessons to learn new words!
- Read and listen to Persian texts from easy to difficult!
- New! To learn about the literary langauge used in classical Persian poetry, click here!
Learn Persian (Farsi) in PersianDee!
Do I Want to Learn Persian?
With over 100 million speakers worldwide (13th in the world), Persian is an official language in Iran (where it is locally known as Farsi), Afghanistan (where it is locally known as Dari) and Tajikistan (where it is locally known as Tajiki and is written using the Cyrillic alphabet). Persian is also spoken by minorities in Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Bahrain. In this website, we take the version of Persian used in the Iranian capital Tehran as our standard.
Persian is an Indo-European language, therefore structurally similar to languages like English, French, Russian, and Hindi. The two languages Arabic and Turkish, although historically in close contact with Persian, are not its relatives. The Islamic conquest has affected Persian considerably; it is written using the Perso-Arabic alphabet and is loaded with Arabic loan words and even word formation patterns. By learning Persian, you become one step closer to learning Arabic, Kurdish, Urdu/Hindi, Pashto, and even Turkish.
Apart from the alphabet, which is a bit difficult in the beginning, learning Persian is quite easy for someone who knows English, for many reasons:
- The structure of Persian grammar and vocabulary is similar to that of English (as opposed to Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, East Asian languages, African languages, etc.).
- Persian has a very simple grammar with less than three hundred conjugated verbs, only two irregular verbs, a loose word order, no gender distinction, and no definite articles.
- Persian has fewer sounds compared to English, French, German, Arabic, Turkish, etc.
Many people love the Persian language because of its poetry. The valuable and extensive body of Persian literature that is read today is mostly the legacy of the Islamic Golden Age when Persian was one of the most widely used languages of the world. Today, it is the sole official language of the world's 17th largest nation and 23rd largest economy. Considerable amounts of books, newspapers and blogs are written in Persian and as of November 2012, the Persian Wikipedia was the 11th largest Wikipedia*, following Japanese and Arabic and above Turkish, Hebrew, Dutch, Swedish and Korean. Learning Persian will provide you with the ability to communicate in one of the major contemporary languages of the world and also gives you access to the rich and magnificent history of Persian literature.
*To estimate the real size of a Wikipedia, the total number of Wikipedia articles was multiplied by the depth of the Wikipedia in that language. See Wikipedia's definition for 'depth'.