Customer Reviews

Modern Persian: Complete Course (Teach Yourself Books)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I purchased my first copy of this great book 33 years ago in London, England. While working at Barclays Bank, I met an Iranian lady from Bank Melli Iran in training classes we attended. I surprised her by being able to speak to her in Farsi. One year later, we married in Tehran, Iran.

After 3 years of marriage, I took a formal course at Harvard University. My professor was from Iran and believed in teaching only the finest, formal forms of Farsi. I have been forever grateful for his approach. In later years, native speakers of Arabic have attempted to teach me Arabic via memorizing vast quantities of colloquial expressions I shall never use. John Mace wrote a book on Arabic, too. The results have been very different. I left Harvard University with an excellent understanding of Farsi. Farsi grammar is far easier than Arabic grammar. I used Ann Lambton's Persian Grammar so much on my travels that the paperbound book fell apart.

During my career, I have worked in the Middle East, Europe, India, and in Vietnam. From my experiences in trying to learn languages in the Middle East, I have had little success with teachers who are native speakers. The reason is that native speakers from the Middle East tend to believe in memorization.

Books written by Western authors have been more useful to me because those authors use the approach of explaining why a language works the way that it does. They stress rules and patterns in languages. The disadvantage of these books tends to be that the authors have not mastered the languages. There will be some errors in these books.

As another reviewer has already noted, John Mace used a brilliant technique in Modern Persian that all future foreign language authors should use. As a professor, I am tired of reading the books written by some foreign language professors who seem to write only to impress other foreign language professors. My goal in learning Farsi was to use the language, not to translate documents. At the same time, I do not need to read books containing the latest slang in Farsi any more than I would read a book on the latest American slang. John Mace's technique is to start the reader with the first two letters of the Fari alphabet. With only those letters, he taught readers how to write in Farsi script "with water." I have no use for books using only transliterations. I want to be able to read, write, and speak Farsi. John Mace continues his book by adding slowly other letters of the Farsi alphabet and by showing words and sentences you can make with only a small number of letters. This is the most pleasant foreign language learning experience I have ever had with the many foreign languages I have tried to learn. John Mace's book is by far the finest self-teaching foreign language book I have ever seen.

Other reviewers have made some valid criticisms. The publishers planned for this book to be carried in your pocket. By keeping the physical size of the book small, the result was that the print is small. With Farsi and Arabic, that is a problem. Some letters of the alphabet differ only in the number of dots above or below the letter. With small print, it can be difficult for a non-native speaker to read. However, by reading transliterations, you will be able to determine the correct letter in Farsi script. Some of the examples include translations with which my Iranian wife disagrees. Whether the correct translation is "carpenter," "mason," or "worker" in today's Iran, I am happy as a learner to at least be using words that will be understood in the context in which I use them.

My experience has been that you can always learn the slang when you hear it in Iran. During my early visits to Iran, some Iranians would comment that I am using a "bookish" version of Farsi. While native speakers would not have been so formal, they understood what I was saying. I was so formal that I used "Aya" to introduce questions in Farsi and "Hal" in Arabic.

Another reviewer is correct in noting that this is an old book. I regard John Mace's and Ann Lambton's books as classics. While such books might not be very helpful for translating an article or book in Farsi on the subject of computers or on the Internet, these classics will continue to be my guides during future visits to relatives in Iran.

I noted with interest that the reviews on this book range from high praise to scorching condemnation. I am one of the fans of this little book. I first encountered it in a bookshop in Karachi just a couple of weeks before I was scheduled to visit Iran as part of an official US Navy visit in 1978. Much to my pleasant surprise I was able to actually speak some of the language on the ground when I got there, sufficiently well so that I could go around town without dismay.

The Teach Yourself series has revised most of their original books in the last twenty years, but like a lot of older readers with some linguistic background I must admit to a preference for at least some of the older editions (although not the old Arabic one, which was a masterpiece of obscurity - truly breathtaking). The "old" Teach Yourself Spanish, for example, is still the best one-volume explanation of Spanish grammar I have ever found in English. Like at least one of the reviewers, I think the older books do a better job of providing a grasp of the structure, after which the student can move on to the commoner colloquialisms. While admittedly this book has a number of mistakes, it manages to make the process of learning basic Persian painless and fun. I think the learner would be well served by working through this book first, and then moving on to a more ambitious text. Starting with Lambton can be stultifying, and I found Thackston dry and incapable of keeping my interest, although I own both of these books and consider them to be excellent references.

One word about the writing lessons, though. Useful as they are, they present features peculiar to Persian. While this is certainly not surprising, the point is that Iranians and Arabs do not write the same way - in fact, their handwritten script is quite different, and one should not assume that working through the lessons on the alphabet in this book would necessarily equip one to write Arabic.

This book, "Teach Yourself Modern Persian" by John Mace, was first published in 1964 and has been reprinted without substantial changes numerous times since. In mid-2004, it was replaced by an entirely different book, but with the same title, by Narguess Farzad. This review deals with the original book by Mace.

As the other reviews below note, the Mace book deals primarily with written, formal Persian, from a grammatical standpoint. It does not contain the latest slang, have any conversational practice, or impart any substantial background on Iranian history, culture, etc. Nonetheless, I think it is still the ideal "starter" book for someone working on his/her own, for the following reasons:

-- It has the easiest introduction to the Arabic alphabet (as used in Persian) of any book I know. Lesson one introduces only three letters, and six words written with these, and provides practice on reading and writing these words. Lesson two adds two more letters, and another handful of words, with more practice. In all, the first eleven lessons (36 pages) deal with the alphabet, and with a bit of grammar, allowing the learner to proceed forward in small but sure steps.

-- This bit-by-bit approach typifies the book; each lesson is from three to six pages, with clear explanations, easy-to-read examples, and practice exercises that go in both ways (with an answer key in the back).

-- Although the Arabic script is used throughout, the vocabulary lists and example sentences also include transliteration, so that the learner is never in any doubt as to the pronunciation (which cannot always be determined from the Arabic script alone).

In contrast, the latest "Teach Yourself Modern Persian" book, by Farzad, crams the entire alphabet into just a few short pages, leaving the learner to "sink or swim", and throws so much at the reader in each lesson that I feel anyone without a background in Persian already would likely find it very hard going.

In short, although old-fashioned (and with a few small errors as well), this book (the Mace book, that is) in my view provides the easiest way for a truly independent learner to make a good start in Persian. A good follow-up book, with a similar but more up-to-date, more sophisticated and considerably more challenging approach, would be "An Introduction to Persian", by Wheeler Thackston. (Note that John Mace has also recently published a reference grammar of Persian, which is a separate book entirely; it is very useful for an intermediate student, but contains no lessons or exercises, merely a systematic explication of the grammar.)

The Mace "Teach Yourself Modern Persian", having been in print for a long time, is still readily available through used book sources, and I highly recommend it to those working on Persian on their own.

I liked this book because it answers all the niggling questions that books written by native Persian speakers answer only obliquely. The book is very organized, proceeds at a reasonable rate, introduces very important concepts in a natural way, and makes irregular verbs easier to understand. Weaknesses of the book relate to its age and to a dearth of colloquial expressions.

This book does a decent job of teaching the Persian alphabet in that it takes you through, letter by letter, so that you learn slowly and thoroughly as you go along. However, the Persian characters are actually printed in such a way that they're difficult to see!

Also, a lot of the sample sentences grammar points and sample sentences Mace provides are grammatically incorrect Persian! Not a good book to start learning from.

Okay, the good points. This book proceeds in a good, logical manner, with plenty of attention to each different subject. The dialogues are useful, and are not ridiculously difficult to learn. The alphabet is explained very well. Overall, it's a very useful and enjoyable intro to Farsi.
There are three problems with this book: the text size is VERY small, making it very difficult to see how the letters are formed. Secondly, the organization of the vocabulary before each text does not proceed logically, nor does it include the appropriate words for the lesson. Finally, the language presented here is the formal, written language, and spoken Farsi really varies drastically from this. (For example, most Persians cut some syllables out of words)

This book, went through the persian language slowly and throughly as to allow the reader a challenging read but not an overwhelming one. I recommend this book to anyone who is wanting to see a world never seen before or only dreamed of.

Farsi (persian) evolves fast. Coloquialisms change as quick as English does. If a spanish speaker wanted to learn English, would you teach him how to read a newspaper first or how to buy groceries and ask the time? One would think the latter. If you wanted to teach someone from Russia how to read the Latin alphabet, would you take it letter by letter each case at a time, and then work on vocabulary, or jump around the alphabet learning a few unrelated words and skipping some of the lower case alltogether. If you want to learn persian using this book, you must know the in and outs of grammar before starting. If you do not, it would be best to look elsewhere. Otherwisewith a lot of work this book will make learning Farsi relatively easy. This book has failed to teach every day Farsi though, and confuse the beginner speaker. Sure the covers have changed over the years as with its size, however I hope (as with other books related to Iran) that the next edition is toroughly revised. None the less the concept (which is used in the book) for learning Farsi is a good one for those experienced with LAnguage terms and or learning other language.

This is a great little book, teaches modernish Persian, and I thoroughly recommend it as a _second_ book for revising Persian (or for learning literary forms if you've studied colloquial). It has a good intro to writing (and tends to use Persian written forms in the text, a good idea as most independent learners tend to copy the print typeface rather than learn a handwritten form). Why not as a first book? Well, only that the language is a bit out of date.

So what instead? Thackston's "Introduction to Persian" is the first choice now for the written language, and for the spoken language either the new "Teach Yourself Persian" (Narguess Farzad) or the "Colloquial Persian" (Abdi Rafiee) would be better as these teach you to speak the language and have cassettes. But read the reviews. "Colloquial Persian" especially has big problems with the use of words before they're introduced, and I don't like the author's confusing use of colloquial forms in the Arabic script - such forms aren't usually written. Mace seems a better teacher than either Rafiee or Farzad, and only Elwell-Sutton's dated "Elementary Persian Grammar" (written Persian) does as well on script.

A hint - if you can get a second-hand copy from the 1960s, the print quality will be significantly higher, the book smaller and (if hard-back) both more robust and lighter, ideal for the traveller.

This book is a fine little reference grammar, but it is not best suited as the beginner's primary learning tool, and it is because the book is presented in the "Teach Yourself" series that I give it only one star. The exercises are insufficient, and one is left with many grammatical explanations and lists of words that one would very much like to reinforce by reading and writing but cannot.

It does have the virtue of providing transliteration in most grammatical examples and it provides a key to the exercises for self correction. There is a master vocabulary with transliteration in the back. Explanations of grammar and of sound changes are detailed, and the book is interesting to experienced language learners, especially those who have some formal background in linguistics. It is a well-written little book, but as a textbook for self-teaching it compares unfavorably with other titles.

For the contemporary language see the fine grammar by Wheeler Thackston (it has sound recordings), and for a scholarly approach see Ann Lambton's grammar, a standard in the field.