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), Pashtu, 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 and considerably fewer vowels compared to English, French, German, Arabic, Turkish, etc.