Customer Reviews

An English Persian Dictionary

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Most English-Persian dictionaries on the market (if not all) are designed to serve the needs of native Persian speakers who are learning English. The English-Persian Dictionary by Dariush Gilani is designed specifically for the English speaker who is learning Persian. Unlike most English-Persian dictionaries, Professor Gilani's book includes a Western alphabet transliteration of Persian words in addition to the Persian alphabet spelling. It is an essential tool for any English speaker who is serious about learning the Persian language.

In An English-Persian Dictionary, native Iranian Dariush Gilani draws upon his many years of experience in the United States studying and teaching languages to assembly the finest and most "user friendly" Persian/English dictionary currently available for students, tourists, the business traveler, and the scholar. The result of a three year effort, An English-Persian Dictionary is enhanced with a cogent presentation on "Reading The Dictionary", "The Persian Alphabet", and a "Key To Pronunciation". An English-Persian Dictionary is confidently recommended for personal, academic, governmental, and corporate language reference resource collections.

As mentioned in the other reviews, this is NOT a dictionary for the native Farsi speaker (see the author's own intro). The phonetic pronunciation guide is very useful. The biggest flaw I have found is when dealing with homonyms (spelling?) and the multiple uses of the same word in English. For example, in Farsi class I was trying to use the verb "to bore" in regards to something inducing boredom. Instead I told my Farsi teacher how a film drilled a hole in me instead. There is no explanation of the meaning of a word, just a list of words.

Nonetheless, I don't go to class without this book and have found it invaluable.

If you are a student of Modern Persian, then this dictionary should suffice for a while. But if you are a native speaker and need a broad English-Persian dictionary, this is not for you. Also, native speakers who need a dictionary to help them in college will not find this dictionary adequate by any stretch of imagination.

Gilani's dictionary is very straight forward: English verb, two or three suggested Persian translations, and a phonetic transliteration into English. No examples. No indication on what the verb's present stem is or how various prepositions are used with respect to the verb. So as an overall dictionary reference Gilani's work is a bit weak. But this reference work shines in two areas though. The phonetic transliteration is very close to the common everyday colloquial pronounciation. The Aryanpur-Kashani dictionary for instance does list vocalizations but they are often quite far off from how a word is typically pronounced in the major metropolitan areas of Iran. Also the suggested Persian translations are dead on. Very current and modern. Useful for translating the news or dialogues. Not very useful for translating literary works or anything with flowery language.

The persian pronunciation is quite nice, with -e' for ezafe, ' for glottal stop, ~ for tashdid/shadde (doubling), and there are only a few obvious typos, mostly involving a vs. â. On the other hand, the book gets many of the english parts of speech wrong--opening to a random page, you will see several errors. It then lists typically 4 or so persian words that translate to the given word. It does not tell you the difference between the words or which one corresponds to several of english meanings. The native english speaker will have no confidence in his translations. There is a lot of blank space on the page that could have held parenthetical comments. That being said, this is still a useful reference, and should be used in conjunction with other references.

Great if you don't know the Persian alphabet. It has the Persian words written with English letters.

I am fairly pleased with this book. It lists the word in English, then marks if it's a verb or noun, etc. After that, it lists a Persian word, it's pronunciation in English letters, then another word written in Persian, and again, it's pronunciation in English letters. The only problem I have with this book, is that it was written for people who already speak a little Persian. It does not distinguish between 2 meanings of the same word. F.eg. the word "die" can mean "to pass away," or be a part of a pair of dice. It does not distinguish which is which and if both words are nouns, you will not know which to use. Another example is "sentence," such as "prison sentence" or a "sentence" of words. Both of these are nouns listed after each other, but no distinction is made to the non-fluent Farsi speaker. For someone who has a limited (3rd grade) Persian background, it is best to get a combination of this dictionary and the "Combined New Persian-English and English-Persian Dictionary" by Abbas Aryanpur Kashani and Manochehr Aryanpur Kashani.

I like this dictionary and it is highly understandable and effective. Nonetheless, the Persian definition of some terms are missing. Allow me to randomly present a few missing (1) technical and (2) historical words: ABSTRACT ALGEBRA, DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS, LINEAR ALGEBRA, CAPACITOR, RESISTOR, ACHAEMENIDS, XERXES, ARTAXERXES, CAMBYSES, ALEXANDER, et cetera. If I visited a university in Iran, I could obtain the meanings of these terms; however, one buys a reference book to obviate running around for answers. Furthermore, it would be nice if the author added a list of common Iranian names.

On the whole, I found this English-Persian dictionary very useful but good things can be superseded by better things.

This is no more than a long vocabulary list. It is not a dictionary in the usual sense given that the definitions are short and often inadequate. One good thing this book has going for it is the transliteration of the farsi into english to help with pronunciation. If you have a good knowledge of how Farsi sounds, don't bother getting this book. If you don't, the transliteration might make it worth the price.