Lonely Planet Farsi (Persian) Phrasebook

Although this is a mini-sized paperback that could easily fit into your shirt pocket, it's remarkably useful. Each page typically has three columns: the leftmost is the English, the middle is the Farsi in romanized letters, and the right column is the Farsi in Arabic script. But it's not merely a phrasebook: there are paragraphs scattered throughout to relieve the monotony. For example, there are many, many notes on culture and linguistic usage. Considering how much information this book contains, it's astonishing it's so small. If the pages were made bigger, it could conceivably serve serve as a freshman-level text! Really after studying from this I was impressed by how handy I became in Farsi, although in all honesty this is likely ascribable neither to my perspicacity nor the boon of this volume, but simply to the fact that Farsi is Indo-European, and so much of its grammar and sensibilities are readily apprehended by a Westerner. But this book was a major help. When I reflect on how little it cost me versus how much use I got out of it, Lonely Planet's "Farsi Phrasebook" may have been one of the most profitable purchases of my life.

A little bit of everything Persian. This would be a good suppliment to any language learning program and a "must have" for the person traveling to any of the Persian (Farsi) speaking countries. A very interesting compact book snd an excellent value.

Even though I've "advanced" through most of the vocabulary and grammar in this guide, I use this as a supplement to my other Persian-English dictionaries because of the handy explanations of grammatical rules. The dictionary in the back is extremely useful, with both an English to Persian section and a section with the phonetic pronounciation of words (in Latin script) for English speakers to easily determine the meaning of (and learn to spell in Persian at the same time!). Very useful for travel and for students of the language who want a small resource guide.

Me and my wife where looking to find a good book for her to learn Farsi, and we found one in a bookshop in Manhatan last week, it is well designed, have almost everything that a person who wants to travel to Iran needs to read, in it. And best of all, it is pretty cheap. I have alreay recomend it to many of my friends and will recomend it to people who want to learn Farsi using our Farsi Learning Project (www.panjere.net/iran/language/learn/) that we will start on September 2001.