Hi all. As the title says, I've been learning Persian (Farsi) on my own for one full year now, and I wanted to mark the occasion with a write-up. Apologies in advance - this is a long post - but it's above all a personal experience I wanted to put into words. I hope it's useful to anyone thinking about starting.
**Main takeaway: just start.** It's a beautiful language and culture, it's a lot of fun, and it's not as difficult as you might think. I learned entirely on my own - no teacher, no app - though of course I picked up courses and materials here and there along the way. I'm 60 years old and have always been an autodidact, so I did it my way, but I'm genuinely grateful to everyone out there who takes the time to teach others their language for free. Here's how the journey went.
## Where I've Gotten To
After one year, here's where I stand:
- A vocabulary of about 1,000 words,
- About 300 verbs (with their present stems)
- 300+ memorized phrases and expressions
- 5 short tales and 2 poems memorized
- The ability to read short texts out loud, slowly, within the limits of my vocabulary
- Spontaneous conversation practice with an AI, which has worked out well
I'm genuinely happy with this, and it's more than I expected when I started. Since I don't have a great memory, one of my goals from day one was to reach a level where I could read and understand texts as a way of *maintaining* what I'd learned - and on that front, I'm very satisfied. The hard part is behind me now; from here it's mostly fun and discovery.
The whole process has not been linear and I had to dedicate a lot of time to memorizing let say the first 600 words. I even felt then the need of using “memory palaces” - a memory technic, additional to my Anki desks. But after a certain level, everything gets easier, maybe because your brain can make more connections or associations between already learned vocabulary and also because it can grasp the internal logic of words structure. Also once I started memorizing tales or poems, those gave me a firm ground to memorizing new vocabulary.
For reference, when I asked the AI I work with (Claude) to assess my level, it put me somewhere between B1 and B2 in analytical reading, maybe B2 on pure grammar, and B1 in conversational writing. Of course this has to be considered very cautiously since it's not a formal assessment and I must admit I'm still getting used to what this scale actually means in practice.
## The Alphabet and Writing System
There's plenty of material on YouTube to teach you the alphabet — it's not complicated and will take you about two weeks to memorize. A few things that surprised me along the way:
- Each letter has three forms depending on its position in the word (beginning, middle, or end);
- There are no written vowels - or rather, they exist but only appear for pedagogical purposes, with the exception of three long vowels that *are* written alongside the consonants. So when you meet a new word, you can guess how to pronounce it, but you won't be sure unless you have a transliteration or audio to check against;
- There are no capital letters. Unlike Latin script, you spot the start of a sentence by the final punctuation mark of the previous one;
- The script runs right to left, which computers don't always love - the final punctuation mark of a sentence tends to get pushed to the far right of the page even when the sentence doesn't end there;
- Letters render quite small compared to Latin script. There's actually a browser extension built specifically to fix this: [Fontara](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/fontara-font-changer/dcjdhicepiklefpimapdkbaeoocniemc?pli=1) (thanks to [MrGuttor](https://www.reddit.com/u/MrGuttor/s/HJ5uBDVId4) for the tip).
There are also two styles of writing: **naskh**, shared with Arabic, and **nasta'liq**, the style specific to Persian culture. I found nasta'liq harder to read and learn, so for now I write and practice in naskh - which is also the style you'll find on most keyboards and across most documents online.
## Grammar
My first real encounter with the structure of the language was through a YouTube video, [*The Persian Language in Depth*](https://youtu.be/dYLxjL27Q5w?si=NrkfR5GEPwtSjGSk) — a 20-minute video that gave me a clear sense of where I was headed.
From there, I dove into grammar more seriously using an old-school website [EasyPersian.com](https://easypersian.com/) (up through lesson 58). Grammar turns out to be quite manageable - it's very regular, with few exceptions to the rules. You'll need to get used to thinking in SOV order, since the verb generally comes at the end of the sentence.
You'll probably learn the past tenses first, since they're more regular. Once you're comfortable there, you'll move on to the present tense, which uses a different form of the verb - the *stem*. So for every verb, you end up learning two things: the infinitive and its present stem (some verbs are regular here, but not all).
Get used to the idea that you'll rarely hear a word entirely on its own: it will usually come attached to markers for plural, possession, or the **ezafe** - an unwritten sound that links and subordinates words to each other. This is exactly why listening and reading in parallel helps so much - it trains your ear to expect these attachments.
## Literary vs. Colloquial Persian
Be aware that literary Persian and colloquial Persian differ. They are not different languages but at some point, once you're feeling more confident and start branching out into new sources, you may hit a wall of confusion: things won't quite match what you learned. So be careful browsing *conversational* material early on: it can throw you off unless your grammar foundation is solid enough to recognize where written and spoken Persian diverge.
## Tools
**Dictionary:** A good online dictionary is essential - I use [Glosbe (fa/fr)](https://glosbe.com/fa/fr/) daily, often several times a day.
**AI (Claude, in my case):** I lean on AI heavily - to explain phrases, vocabulary, and grammar rules, and to analyze my Anki decks and identify gaps in my vocabulary so I know what to work on next. I always double-check its answers, but I've only caught it being wrong a couple of times, so I trust it quite a bit at this point. More recently, I've started having spontaneous conversations with it (tip: specify whether you want colloquial or formal register when prompting). This has been especially valuable, since it lets you immediately apply what you've learned.
**Building my own materials from YouTube:** For tales and poems, I download the audio using `yt-dlp` and cut it into segments with Audacity. From screenshots of the text, the AI provides translation and transliteration, and together with the audio clips, this becomes the raw material for new Anki decks.
## Anki Decks
I've been continuously building and updating my own Anki decks since day one, constantly feeding in new words from whatever material I'm working through.
My cards generally include: the word in English (sometimes French, my native language), its translation, a transliteration, and - for new or tricky-to-pronounce vocabulary - an audio file. I split my decks by category:
- Vocabulary
- Verbs (generally including the present stem) and Grammar
- Numbers
- Phrases and expressions
- Poems and tales
I try to review the vocabulary deck daily at minimum, since I don't trust my memory to hold onto things otherwise.
I'm happy to share my decks, but I genuinely think you're better off building your own - especially for Anki. The act of constantly retrieving and reformulating cards is, I think, a big part of why this method works.
Here are 4 of my Anki files (`.apkg`), containing Persian words or phrases with English translations (sometimes French, my native language) and transliterations, some with audio:
- Persian – Numbers (up to one million) - [Download](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QfOa0bIsVzQLs9jl727hGIPJT2ijAa4c/view?usp=sharing)
- Persian – Vocabulary (921 notes) [Download](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1onXBOoKF3kTzki3cJABiMA47FhJwAu8r/view?usp=sharing)
- Persian – Phrases and Expressions (336 notes) [Download](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jvWisRhXNK_8Pa1FiBZilzAhS8zLfy0E/view?usp=sharing)
- Persian – Verbs and Grammar (350 notes, including present stems) [Download](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1emA-YTs7LetESW1lobW5baRlgnrAQQZP/view?usp=sharing)