Customer Reviews

Colloquial Persian

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

 

 

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.

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".

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.

:-)

I have several books on persian. This book is great for helping someone put together words and everyday conversation. It would not be great as a first book but it is wonderful for someone with a little background of study who wants to learn to converse or just understand. I recommend this book highly as a supplement to study

Its hard to teach a language without a big fat text book, however Leila Moshiri does a great job in such little space. If only there was a kink or two made to make some obviouse questions answered, this is as good as a 'pocket sized' book on any language could get. Unfortunately the persian script is not used, which is not nessasarily needed but highly useful if traveling Iran. The main problem realtes to how inconsistant english transliteration can be. It needs to be pointed out that certain sounds in Farsi are concidered the same in England. Some sound in Farsi simply don't exist in english. Farsi is a comparably easy language to learn, best done with a good kick start, which Moshiri does fairly well. The dictionary in the back came to be very useful, though sometimes frustrating. Three Stars

This text is far from perfect, but if your aim is to learn the kind of Persian you'll hear in TV shows and popular Iranian music, this book will get you started on the right track. All the other commonly available courses, including the newer edition of _Colloquial Persian_, focus pretty much exclusively on the literary language, which is of course well worth learning but won't help you much if your focus is on popular Iranian culture.

It's too bad, however, that more of the course material isn't recorded and that there are no recorded drills. All the same, I got a lot a lot out of this course, especially considering its comparatively low price.

"Colloquail Rersia by Leila Moshiri, Recorded by S. Mirzadeh, F. Moattari, Copyright 1988 by Routledge, 1 audio cassette edition.

This is came from library resell market major collection central general, so that is library stickers and marks and official making normally include. 1 audio cassette is in plastic case. But, the case has been seen cracked tapped and latest dirt.
But, the cassette is the still palyable and well sond.

GREAT FOR WHO ARE INTERESTING IN THIS SUBJECT AND FIELD.