Customer Reviews

Colloquial Persian: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series (CD))

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is better than Thackston's "An Introduction to Persian", which can be forbidding for beginners. It differs from Thackston in that it's emphasis is on spoken Persian rather than written Persian. However, having said that, neither book really does much to teach you how to read or write. They should be viewed more as refreshers and practice guides. Also, Rafiee's book comes with a key to the exercises and a cassette to aid in pronunciation, which Thackston's book lacks.

After having bought several Persian self help books(most were of the literary form of Persian), this was a welcome attempt to fill the gap with the colloquial form. The only other colloquial book I have seen of merit is also from Rutledge publishers, but writen in roman transliteration. However, this new book written with Farsi script sadly falls into the same traps as many other language self help books, by constantly introducing new grammatical forms and vocabulary before explaining them; causing the reader to stop and try to look up an explaination somewhere else in the book- very frustrating.
Also, it give too much emphasis on slangy social etiquette forms early in the book used in meeting, greeting, introductions, etc. which also create frustrations when an adult learner tries to analize their structures grammatically.
Also, the vocabulary at end of book is not consistant with the words given in exercises, especially the English-Persian half.
Tapes are adecuate, thank goodness, and the whole set being the only "game in town"(using Farsi script colloquially),gives the nod to this purchase until someone else comes alone with a better version.

this is a decent introduction to spoken and written modern Farsi. I really did like it.
My two points of contention is that the written, atleast in the beginning and with the vocabulary does NOT include the vowel marks, i felt it would be more useful if all vocab and sentences in the first few chapters utilized vowel marks. makes life a tad bit easier.
I ended up not even focusing on the written and JUST used the book for the spoken

my other point of contention is that
they use the letter "x" for the "kh" sound, which is fairly gutterial...i felt it was alittle confusing.

This book teaches you both the polite spoken based more on the written (people will think ur really cute!) and slowly introduces alittle of the actual way its spoken (sound changes and whatnot)

but overall a really good book and introduction

A self-teaching book should be user-friendly and not leave the reader thumbing through the vocabularies to find undefined words. Unfortunately, this book violates that rule in the very first chapter. However, I think it is in some ways a vast improvement over most other Persian books, which are either too scholarly, too dry, or too simplistic. This book falls somewhere in the middle, and with a little careful editing it may become a four-star or five-star item.

This has to be one of the sloppiest excuses for a language text that has ever made it into print. In exercise after exercise, you are asked to use words that are not provided in the vocabulary and for which the only option is to look up the answer in the key in the back. The trouble is, some of the words in the answer key aren't in the glossary either, so even if you can memorize a sentence you are still left wondering what the individual words mean and how and when they are used. Has nobody at Routledge ever heard of proofreading? This is such a shoddy piece of work that I would seriously consider giving it zero stars if that were an allowed option.

Unfortunately, good Persian courses are very hard to find. The two "big" series, Colloquial and Teach Yourself both have updated their courses but the results disappoint. There are some positive aspects to this course. The grammar descriptions are rather good, and I especially like that both the Persian letters and the Roman letters are used in this course. This should satisfy both those wanting to learn to read Persian and those more interested in first learning how to pronounce and speak.

The main problem, or perhaps the only problem, is the vocabulary. Few Colloquial courses feature such a limited vocabulary as this one, not even 1000 words. A course with 2000 words would have been excellent and 1500 words would still have been decent. Not even 1000 words means that you are left on your own too soon, without a sufficient basic vocabulary to move on. While I still recommend everybody to buy this book over Teach Yourself Persian (even smaller vocabulary, bad grammar explanations, no transliteration), I hope a more extensive course will be published soon.

There are many improvements from the previous version; the vocabulary and dialogs are a bit more up-to-date and better reflect the rhythm and humor of Iranian conversation.

This book is a wonderful introduction to spoken Persian, and so far the best in the market. It is a pity the book doesn't go much deeper into the language, but it covers a great deal of Persian grammar and vocabulary, stablishing a great base to start learning literary Persian and going further into the language. The dialogues and recordings are superb and it helps very much understanding real Persian. Also there are many helpful exercises after each lesson and a good in-depth introduction to the script, which is used along with transliteration all along the book, thus helping the learner mastering the script and developing reading skills. I wish a second part of this book was released, I would definitely buy it.

Good points are: lessons are short, everyday life situations, good introduction of written persian, dialogues on the CDs are fast (and thus are close to real world situations), answers to exercises, english-persian dictionary. Also, the book is well structured.
Someone complained about the fact that people had to look up words frequently in the dictionary, that's true but you should write a list of all the words on a sheet and learn it anyway.
I first tried to learn persian with a french book but they switch to written persian at lesson 7. So it requires you to learn scripting early, which is a bad idea i think. This book lets you learn spoken persian.

Colloquial Persian is an incredible introduction to spoken and written Farsi. The grammar points are clear and concise with no confusing jargon, and the content layout is very well structured. New vocabulary and grammar points are introduced after each dialogue, but this never makes things confusing (as a previous reviewer suggested), and in fact most modern language books are structured in this way.

A finely tuned masterpiece!