Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself: Modern Persian (TY: Complete Courses)

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Having started my study of Persian over 30 years ago with the original "Teach Yourself Modern Persian", by John Mace, first published in 1964 and reprinted numerous times since then, I was eager to compare this newly released book by Narguess Farzad with the original.

Unfortunately, while apparently more modern, the latest version will likely prove more difficult going for most people trying to learn Persian on their own. The original version featured a bit-by-bit approach, taking 36 pages to introduce the reader to the Arabic alphabet as used in Persian; this book merely provides two charts of the entire alphabet, one for tracing purposes, and then appends a bit over one page of exercises in combining the letters. After that, apparently, you're expected to have it down cold. The approach by Mace was certainly more user-friendly to readers with no background in the alphabet.

The book then proceeds at a quick pace; the vocabulary lists can be dauntingly long for learners, and transliteration is used sparingly, sometimes leaving any reader not fully accustomed to the Arabic script at a disadvantage in terms of proper pronunciation. In contrast, the original book by Mace included transliteration for all vocabulary items and example sentences. Farzad's order of presentation is a bit unusual; the present tense of verbs other than "to be" and "to have" is not presented until page 127, for example.

I am no longer as innocent of Persian as I was 30-odd years ago, but when I think back to my situation then as a total beginner, the original book by Mace strikes me as being much more suitable for someone working on his/her own to learn Persian. (It is still readily available through used-book channels.) I would thus recommend that people indeed looking for a "Teach Yourself" book for Persian get a copy of the original "Teach Yourself Modern Persian" by Mace, if possible, and then perhaps use the latest "Teach Yourself Modern Persian" by Farzad as a follow-up book to solidify the basics. Another useful book after getting the basics down is "An Introduction to Persian" by Wheeler Thackston, which would likely be fairly hard slogging for most true beginners.

I am not new to Farsi and have been trying to learn it for atleast 5 years, i am getting good at it and am going to Iran this summer.
well, I picked up this book as a refresher and whilst Its one of the better Farsi books out there its NOT the best and I found a few things that are hampering when using this book.

for one, I ntoiced in the exercises in the sentences you need to translate often she uses words that HAVE NOT been introduced previously...not in the vocabulary or anything like that so its necessary to go to the inadequate dictionary in the back and try to find the word.

another thing is that again in the exercises often she will write, say something like "i have friends in Tehran" and then you need to translate it into Farsi. well, when you go to the answer key the answer would be "I have friends in Iran" or soemthing of this sort!!!
So there is quite a bit of disunity between the exercises, answer keys and words chosen to be used for the exercises.

It would of been far better if she'd of either put ALL the new words used in the vocabulary pages OR of not of used words she hasnt used before keeping things very simple.

all this is exceedingly frustrating...even for a non-newbie like me.

on the other hand I do like how she transcribes Farsi into English and I also like her formatte, what she introduces...its really good.

In terms of the print, the new edition of the Teach yourself Persian is a lot better than the old one, but the content is not. The grammatical points are not thoroughly presented, that is, not quite enough for a serious beginner to have an panoramic view of Persian grammar. Second, it offers too little information on colloquial Persian. Third, too few reading passages. It has audio CDs, which is good, but most Persian textbooks out there in the market have audios too. So if you want to teach yourself, I'd suggest to try out different books, among them, I recommend Thackston or John Mace as basic reference; tackling Lambton if you are interested in classical stuff,if you'd like to learn more about different varieties of Persian, Baizoyev's Beginner's Tajiki is a quite good book, if you just want learn some Persian phrases to travel or impress your Iranian friends... forget what I just said, get lonely planet Persian phrasebook.

In an effort to learn the Persian language I ordered this course because it came with a CD to help with pronounciation of this difficult but beautiful language. It did not include the necessary CD. This makes the book sent only half a help since it continually refers to the audio CD for lessons. Therefore I rate it at 2 1/2stars. I would not purchase from this publisher again with trust.

I have used poor textbooks before, so it's sort of okey for me. I have to use other resources to find the correct pronunciation but not everyone is resourceful or would be happy to search the pronunciation of many words, which may not even have complete vocalisation symbols, let alone romanisation. Besides, as other reviewers pointed out, there are problems with material used in exercises, which was not previously explained.

Perhaps it's good for learners who like extra stress.

As a first course for Persian, this book is really not too bad. However, it does suffer from flaws in its organization, particularly in the early chapters, that could well discourage many learners from going any farther with it.

The first few chapters of this book are really little more than vocabulary lists. There is a chapter on greetings (a bewildering number of them) and then a chapter dealing with time expressions (the months of the Iranian calendar, for instance, which are named after Zoroastrian archangels). Working along with the accompanying CD, these lessons can give a beginner a quite good pronunciation early on in the game, which is fime, but you are four lessons in before you are forming even the simplest sentences.

The pace does pick up after that, and the subsequent chapters do have some interesting dialogues. One of the interesting and challenging aspects of Persian is the ezafe (the long strings of nouns and/or adjectives that are built up with the concatenating particle 'e'/'ye'. The author's treatment of these somplex structures is particularly good. The different tenses and moods of the Persian verb are also well covered.

One negative, though, is that although most of the material in the book is everyday conversational, the language that is actually used is not colloquial and the book does not devote much space to illuminating the difference between literary and colloquial pronunciation. In particular, verbs are considerably simplified in the spoken colloquial language. A serious student of Persian has to be able to be at home in both these facets of the language.Better treatments of this essential aspect of understanding spoken Persian are available in the Living Language Course (geared to the colloquial language) or Thackston's 'Introduction to Persian' (more literary).

This book is great for beginners. It makes learning Persian simple. I certainly isn't the only book you will need, but it is a great start.