14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Better books are available., July 31, 2000
The "Colloquial" series is very uneven in quality, and this is one of its poorer examples. It suffers the deficiencies of most Persian grammars available in English: too little of everything. Too little grammar, too little vocabulary, too few exercises, too little recorded on the cassette.
For good Persian learning materials see "Introduction to Persian" by Wheeler Thackston, "Persian Grammar" by Ann Lambton, and "Spoken Persian" by Serge Obolensky.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
This is really just a phrase book, January 22, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Colloquial Persian: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series) (Audio Cassette)
This is one of the only affordable cassette-book sets for learning Persian, so in that sense, it is worth buying. However, a lot of the taped portion is just what you might find in a phrase book. There aren't any dialogues in the book and the spoken passages sound extremely stilted. It is not of the same quality as the more recently produced books in the "Colloquial Series".
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
what the honest truth? dont get it if your a newbie to Farsi, November 28, 2004
Stay away from this book if you are brand spanking new to studying Farsi language. its not worth it.
pick a standard farsi book
the reasons are this...
Imagine if you were new to the English language and you came upon a book that taught you "colloquile southern American English" and lets say instead of it covering the proper, standard Engish used by educated people all over the world (for the most part)it taught you "ya'll" for you all or "sayz wha?" for what did you say? something like this.
this is EXACTLY WHAT THIS BOOK IS!!!
Farsi is split into Standard Farsi based on written, proper farsi and more everyday colloquile Farsi which people speak *in almost every situation* well, I am a half-native speaker and I can honestly say if you dont have a very good grasp of standard Farsi then this book will confuse you.
numerous sounds change in spoken farsi.
i.e. proper is Tehran, dialectal is Tehroon...now just imagine only learning Tehroon and coming across the word Tehran. you will be probably quite confused. also Farsi speakers tend to jumble up words, skip vowels...you need to have a firm hand on proper farsi...such as verbs so you can then actually USE what you learn...you will be able to look at this book and be like..oh yeah thats why that vowel changes or ohh yeah that makes sense...
Also, each area of Iran has its own dialect and prounciations so whats in that book is "tehrooni dialect"...if you go to another area people will understand you but its confusing.
hence...unless you just want a quick easy phrase book stay away from this book!
its seriously best to use a standard farsi textbook, learn the PROPER basics and THEN when your good enough move on to this...you will save yourself quite alot of headaches!!!
sorry if this is wordy, i just wanted it to be helpful.
:-)
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