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Basic Persian
This fully revised second edition of Basic A Grammar and Workbook comprises an accessible reference grammar and related exercises in a single volume. This book presents twenty grammar units, covering the core material which students would expect to encounter in their first year of learning Persian. Grammar points are followed by multiple examples and exercises which allow students to reinforce and consolidate their learning. Key features • a clear, accessible format • many useful language examples • jargon-free explanations of grammar • abundant exercises with full answer key • a glossary of Persian-English terms • a subject index Rigorous yet engaging, Basic Persian is suitable for both class use and independent study, making it an ideal grammar reference and practice resource for both beginners and students with some knowledge of the language.
276 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 10, 2019
There's this thought that's been coming back to me more and more recently: honestly, why do drugs when you can learn new languages? If you want a cheap and legal way to alter your mental state, it's pretty much unbeatable. Basic Persian was a fine example. When I started, I knew about five words of Persian and had a very shaky grasp of Arabic script, which still looked like squiggles if I wasn't really concentrating. I opened the book and began to read. And wow, after a while the squiggles turned into letters which I could see even when I wasn't concentrating, and then lines of letters turned into words, and then lines of words turned into sentences. As drug trips go, it was pretty damn amazing. To the best of my knowledge, there aren't even any counterindicated side-effects.
Don't get me wrong, I am still total crap at Persian, but definitely crap at a different level. The grammar is very nice. It's amazingly simple and logical, far easier than English, French, German, Italian, Swedish or Russian; it's maybe even more minimal than Japanese. The verbs in particular are incredibly straightforward. For French, I don't know how many different forms you have to learn for each verb - several dozen at least. Even for English, which is generally acknowledged to be one of the least challenging languages in this respect, you have to learn three forms ("go", "went", "gone"). For Persian, you have to learn only two. Everything else is done by sticking on regular prefixes and suffixes, the way we stick on an 's' to turn "go" into "goes", or an 'ing' to turn it into "going". The syntax is also very simple. There is no gender. They don't even distinguish "he" from "she". There is no case. ("He" and "him" are also the same). There are none of those odd rules for creating questions that clutter up most European languages - foreigners hate English "do" and French "est-ce que". You don't do weird things like German does, sometimes putting the verb after the subject, sometimes putting it before, and sometimes moving it to the end. In Persian, the verb is at the end, and that's where it stays.
The real challenge is still the script. The fact that they miss out the short vowels, like Arabic and Hebrew, means that the language does kind of resemble txtspk at times; if you don't know a word, you can't in general figure out how it's pronounced just by looking at it. That's annoying. But every language I know has at least one annoying feature, and this is definitely less than usual.
Yay Persian! I am going to go back to my dealer to get some more of this.
Don't get me wrong, I am still total crap at Persian, but definitely crap at a different level. The grammar is very nice. It's amazingly simple and logical, far easier than English, French, German, Italian, Swedish or Russian; it's maybe even more minimal than Japanese. The verbs in particular are incredibly straightforward. For French, I don't know how many different forms you have to learn for each verb - several dozen at least. Even for English, which is generally acknowledged to be one of the least challenging languages in this respect, you have to learn three forms ("go", "went", "gone"). For Persian, you have to learn only two. Everything else is done by sticking on regular prefixes and suffixes, the way we stick on an 's' to turn "go" into "goes", or an 'ing' to turn it into "going". The syntax is also very simple. There is no gender. They don't even distinguish "he" from "she". There is no case. ("He" and "him" are also the same). There are none of those odd rules for creating questions that clutter up most European languages - foreigners hate English "do" and French "est-ce que". You don't do weird things like German does, sometimes putting the verb after the subject, sometimes putting it before, and sometimes moving it to the end. In Persian, the verb is at the end, and that's where it stays.
The real challenge is still the script. The fact that they miss out the short vowels, like Arabic and Hebrew, means that the language does kind of resemble txtspk at times; if you don't know a word, you can't in general figure out how it's pronounced just by looking at it. That's annoying. But every language I know has at least one annoying feature, and this is definitely less than usual.
Yay Persian! I am going to go back to my dealer to get some more of this.
March 5, 2024
Routledge’s “Basic X” and “Intermediate X” workbooks add up to about a B1 level of the language concerned. Generally they are not textbooks, rather they assume that one has learned the language from another textbook that has dialogues, common conversational vocabulary, etc. Nevertheless, since Persian is often learned by historians, linguists, etc. who are focused first and foremost on reading, a motivated student could gain a good initial knowledge of Persian from this book alone. The focus is on Standard Persian of Iran; no reference whatsoever is made to the colloquial language (often called “Tehrani dialect”) that Iranians now speak on an everyday basis or use for informal written contexts. At this very basic level, however, all the material introduced is also relevant for the Tajik and Dari forms of Persian.
Each of the twenty chapters here introduces some aspect of grammar in detail and then drills on it. I give this only an average rating because sometimes the exercises are a bit unimaginative and repetitive. Moreover, although each chapter contains an ample list of new vocabulary used in that lesson, those words may be used only a single time in an example sentence or one of the exercises, and little attempt is made to repeatedly use those words so that the student is more likely to memorize them.
The list of new vocabulary, as well as the complete glossary at the back of the book, has Latin transliteration of words so that one can see the vowels. However, in both the description of grammar matters and in the exercise, the Arabic script alone is used.
Each of the twenty chapters here introduces some aspect of grammar in detail and then drills on it. I give this only an average rating because sometimes the exercises are a bit unimaginative and repetitive. Moreover, although each chapter contains an ample list of new vocabulary used in that lesson, those words may be used only a single time in an example sentence or one of the exercises, and little attempt is made to repeatedly use those words so that the student is more likely to memorize them.
The list of new vocabulary, as well as the complete glossary at the back of the book, has Latin transliteration of words so that one can see the vowels. However, in both the description of grammar matters and in the exercise, the Arabic script alone is used.
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