Modern Persian: A Course-Book [Audio Cassette]

If you're using this book for an in-person course on Farsi, it might be of use to you. But the grammar lessons are opaque and hard to follow. The author also professes a distaste for transliteration into latin characters - which might be a great approach to take in later courses in Farsi, but if you're a complete beginner, it just makes all the words hard to follow and creates a lot of confusion about pronunciation. There's also no English-Farsi word reference in the back, although there is a Farsi-English one. Bottom line: there are better lesson books out there on Farsi. Get one of them.

I regard this textbook as an excellent introduction to Persian. The treatment of the language is easy to understand and I have observed that this book holds my interest even more so than the classic John Mace's Teach Yourself Modern Persian, which I also admire. A previous reviewer castigates the text as being "impenetrable;" however, to my mind, that label better applies to Wheeler Thackston's An Introduction to Persian; for instance, chapter 3 of the third edition with indefinite "ezafe" constructions. It's true that Simin Abrahams is not using transliteration although, except for sukun which indicates the absence of a vowel, there is ample use of short vowel sound markers: zabar ("a"), zir ("i") and pesh ("u"). For non-colloquial courses, the absence of transliteration I find to be non-objectionable and it offers the advantage of denying a crutch that otherwise would interfere with the internalization of alternate alphabets with proper spelling (a fortiori with Persian which boasts several letters with the same pronunciation). The only problem is that Persian also has some letters (notably "vav") with two sounds for a single letter and also has instances of silent letters ("vav" again is the prominent culprit) so that, for certain words, it would have been useful to have some transliterations e.g. roshtan, khanavade, miravam. Accordingly, I have annotated the text to suit my needs adding sukuns and transliterations where helpful. Another reviewer complains that the Persian font is too small to be legible; I don't find that to be the case either. In terms of size and print quality, there is no issue with the Persian font's legibility at least for the paperback edition I bought printed in the UK with blue cover and white letters by RoutledgeCruzon in 2005 and subsequently reprinted twice in each of 2006 and 2007. The binding is good (better than Mace's where pages soon fly out) and, for those who suffer from susceptibility to contact dermatitis, the quality of the paper is high (better than Mace's and Thackston's).
I find two disadvantages with the text. First, there are no answer keys. Obviously, answer keys are essential for checking comprehension of individual lessons. Second, as observed by another reviewer, there isn't an English-Persian glossary appended to the back of the text. Not to despair: picking up a resource like Yavar Deghani's Learner's Dictionary is a possible solution to this shortcoming. For those who are complete beginners, unfamiliar with Persian or Arabic script, without benefit of a teacher, however, working through Part I of Mace's Teach Yourself Persian (pp. 3-39) would be recommended preparation before starting Simin Abraham's text.

This book was required text for a beginning Persian class, and not a single person in the class liked it. While its lessons are geared for beginners, and the step by step approach to sentence building was good, the lack of translation into Roman characters makes it nearly incomprehensible unless you've had exposure to Persian characters. Even after I started understanding the characters, the printing in this book is so small that you practically need a magnifying class to be able to understand what you're seeing. This is not a good stand-alone book if you want to learn Persian.