About This Website

PersiandDee is designed as a guide for people who want to teach themselves Persian and are already motivated enough to be able to follow this kind of medium. Obviously, language learning takes more than reading the content of a website. PersianDee was built with the idea that talking about apples and bananas (along with a long list of tropical fruits and African animals) is not the best way to learn a language for a motivated person. Similarly, depending on your purposes, handling conversations in cafés and restaurants is not always a better initial step than getting familiar with the past simple tense.

Different languages are learned for different purposes. PersianDee acknowledges that Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan do not attract many foreign tourists annually. It also acknowledges the fact that for people who start learning Persian, this is probably not the first experience in learning a language as an adult. For these reasons, PersianDee has chosen to be a bit old-fashioned compared to other language learning websites, putting more weight on boring things like "word stress" and "the subjunctive mood" while paying less attention to elephants and zebras.

I started writing the content for this website in 2005, when I was sixteen. I was teaching myself French at the time and was impressed to see how effectively the web can help me learn a new language. My main source of inspiration was LanguageGuide.org, and I still admire that website greatly for how simple and to-the-point it is.

For seven years, building this website was my main hobby. This experience taught me a lot about English (which is a second langauge for me), linguistics, and web design skills. After I became a student in Computer Engineering in Sharif University of Technology in Tehran and when later during my undergraduate years I decided to switch to Linguistics for Ph.D, I learned other things that helped me further in building this website. I must admit, however, that the content was almost ready by 2011 and for two years I was busy developing the actual website with as slow a pace as you can imagine. Today, after so many years, I'm not proud of many of the things I've written here (even though I lightly revised many of them in 2026). However, I don't think I'll ever come back to this project to make substantial improvements to the content (the layout underwent a major upgrade in 2026). I am currently (as of 2026) a linguist, and my research is on phonology as well as other things such as the interface between linguistics and literature (poetic meter, rhyme, poetic language, etc.).

The idea of helping people learn Persian still makes me excited. I'll be happy to help you, and your emails are more than welcome. Feel free to contact me about the Persian language, the website itself or anything else that you find relevant.