How to interlink Persian and other Indo-European/Indo-Germanic languages?

[langmon]

Really would like to start learning at least a bit of Persian.
How to use one's existing knowledge of Indo-European/Indo-Germanic languages (German, English, Spanish, French, ...) for putting a foot into the Persian door, figuratively speaking?

[eskandar]

I would say just jump right in and don't let the Perso-Arabic alphabet scare you. It's easy enough to learn and once you get below the surface you'll see that the grammar is not unlike French or Spanish, and there are plenty of Indo-European cognates (Persian dokhtar = daughter, Tochter; maadar = mother, madre, Mutter; etc).

[langmon]

I would say just jump right in and don't let the Perso-Arabic alphabet scare you. It's easy enough to learn and once you get below the surface you'll see that the grammar is not unlike French or Spanish, and there are plenty of Indo-European cognates (Persian dokhtar = daughter, Tochter; maadar = mother, madre, Mutter; etc).

Well, the Alphabet doesn't scare me anyway . Just need to focus on the additional letters, or those with a pronunciation different from Arabic. And you are very right about the cognates, too.

[eskandar]

If you know Arabic and a few Indo-European languages, you can pick up Persian extremely quickly. Between the IE cognates and the Arabic loans (40% or more of the vocabulary is borrowed from Arabic) you should have no trouble with the vocabulary, and the grammar is fairly simple: no gender, no case endings, nothing too crazy.

[linguoboy]

Ezāfe constructions are a little funky, but I guess Arabic prepares you for that. What I struggle with is paraphrasis. Persian is as bad as English when it comes to using light verbs and phrasal verbs to express common activities in unexpected ways.

[langmon]

Ezāfe constructions are a little funky, but I guess Arabic prepares you for that. What I struggle with is paraphrasis. Persian is as bad as English when it comes to using light verbs and phrasal verbs to express common activities in unexpected ways.

Any EN or FA example for the unexpected ways you mean?

[eskandar]

In English, an example would be verbs like "to come across" (=to find) or "to bring up" (=to mention). Some Persian examples would include سر زدن (sar zadan, "to visit," literally "to hit head") or یاد گرفتن (yad gereftan, "to learn," literally "to get memory"). Persian has plenty of verbs like this, and I agree with linguoboy that it's probably the most challenging aspect of learning the language. Fortunately for the learner, they are easy enough to find in dictionaries.

[Bubulus]

In English, an example would be verbs like "to come across" (=to find) or "to bring up" (=to mention). Some Persian examples would include سر زدن (sar zadan, "to visit," literally "to hit head") or یاد گرفتن (yad gereftan, "to learn," literally "to get memory").

Those Persian examples look like light verbs, so better English analogies would be the likes of "to make use of" (=to use), "to give power to" (=to empower) and "to take a shower" (=to shower).

Does Persian have verb+adverb phrasal verbs like "to come across" and "to bring up"?

[voron]

On a somewhat related note, I read that in Zazaki researchers counted only around 150 verb roots. All the other verbs are periphrastic constructions like in the examples above, or constructions with auxilary verbs, the most common of which is kerden (to do).

It seems to be a common feature of the Iranian languages.

Does Persian have verb+adverb phrasal verbs like "to come across" and "to bring up"?

It is very common in Kurmanji. Adverbs like "up" and "down" can function as prefixes, and form a great number of verbs:
ber - in front
ber malê - in front of the house

dan - to give (cognate with the Romance and Slavic word)
berdan - to leave smth: 'to give in front'

[eskandar]

Does Persian have verb+adverb phrasal verbs like "to come across" and "to bring up"?

Yes, Persian has both light verbs and phrasal verbs. I just wanted to give some examples of verb forms that can't intuitively be understood even if you understand the composite parts. Phrasal verbs of that kind in Persian include things like بالا آوردن baalaa aavardan "to vomit," literally "to bring up."

On a somewhat related note, I read that in Zazaki researchers counted only around 150 verb roots. All the other verbs are periphrastic constructions like in the examples above, or constructions with auxilary verbs, the most common of which is kerden (to do).

It seems to be a common feature of the Iranian languages.

Sounds just like Persian, which most commonly uses کردن kardan "to do" to form auxiliary verbs.