Customer Reviews

A Persian Reader (Persian Edition)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a really nice little book, I was poking through it the other day. The description is lacking in one important detail however: this is designed for small children who are native speakers of Farsi, so that they can learn to read and write their mother tongue. If this is what you're looking for it's a fun little book.

Ibex Books, the source of this book is a wonderful little publisher and is well worth browsing their other tiles as well, in both English and Farsi. They also make some nice Bi-Lingual volumes.

No instructional language textbook can do it all. This one is designed to teach you how to write and read the Farsi (Persian) script, which is very close to the Arabic script.

It is very suitable for children who know around-the-house Farsi but need to learn the script. It is also quite suitable for adults, if used in conjunction with a classroom course or on your own with other books (in this case you'll have to be a bit more enterprising) to see lots of handwritten samples, including little arrows indicating how to form the letters properly.

There are no English explanations or transcriptions; this book is solely in Farsi. (So if you're on your own, if you want to know what you're actually reading and writing you'll need to labor over a dictionary.) Grammar is occasionally allowed to take backseat to the need to practice writing sentences with the limited letters you've learned at that point in the book. (Ex.: "Sky cloud has" [The sky has clouds] instead of "Sky cloudy is" [The sky is cloudy].

Farsi has 6 basic vowels -- one is uniquely written (always recognizable, long a), two employ letters also used as consonants (i/y and u/v), and three are not written at all, except for children up to about the 2nd grade (e, o, short a), when little vowel marks, or diacritics, are used. This book helpfully teaches and writes the vowel marks initially, and once a word has been used a few times, it no longer uses the marks. Kind of like having the carpet [Persian rug...?] pulled out from under you...but it's a good approach. First crawl, then walk.

I've used 4 other Farsi textbooks -- each has its strengths and weaknesses. Of these 4 (Thackston, Lambton, Mace, and Rafiee), only Mace provides a usable overview of how to write Farsi. If being able to write (not just read and speak) is important to you, I recommend this book for practice.

The book is for farsi native speakers only. It is a child's book for learning how to write. This book does not have English explanations for learning Farsi.