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mōdgethanc wrote:Lately I've gotten a bit of an interest in Scottish Gaelic as well, and Scots (why? I don't know anyone from Scotland and have no plans of going there any time soon) which I think I cured by looking at its grammar. It is aesthetic-looking as fuck though.
linguoboy wrote:Why can't they have Persian? I'd love to find good resources for that, but they really seem to lag behind other major languages.
eskandar wrote:linguoboy wrote:Why can't they have Persian? I'd love to find good resources for that, but they really seem to lag behind other major languages.
Can't help you with Duolingo, but if you're looking for good Persian learning resources, talk to me. It's not on the level of commonly-taught languages like French, of course, but there's no shortage of Persian pedagogical material.
Car wrote:What's out there for Persian?
eskandar wrote:Car wrote:What's out there for Persian?
Depends on what you're interested in (both in terms of type of material and type of language). Generally I can recommend Wheeler Thackston's An Introduction to Persian and John Mace's Persian Grammar: For Reference and Revision which are both excellent introductions to the language. For a focus on speaking, the Teach Yourself book by Narguess Farzad is very good, and the Colloquial book by Abdi Rafiee is OK. There is also a Pimsleur course. None of these are free resources per se, but all are available in PDF/MP3 on filesharing sites.
As far as free resources go, there's lots of good stuff online nowadays, like this University of Texas web resource. The textbook Persian of Iran Today is freely available online and is really good; designed for the classroom, but can be used for self-study as well. easypersian.com is also a good website for beginners (now accompanied by a Youtube series). There is a podcast called Chai and Conversation which teaches the language. There are also lots of materials on Memrise.
There are many more resources out there, but this is what comes to mind for beginners. Hope it piques some interest. Persian is a remarkably easy language to get started with in several ways (no cases, no grammatical gender at all, fairly simple grammar, and much of the basic vocabulary, like numbers/kinship terms/etc., is Indo-European). And I'm here to answer any questions learners have over at the Persian forum.
Car wrote:That sounds good, considering how difficult I found Arabic when I tried it (but then I had the impression that my old Assimil edition isn't particularly good at making it seem less difficult). I read somewhere that Persian shares quite a lot with Spanish in terms of grammar?
eskandar wrote:Car wrote:That sounds good, considering how difficult I found Arabic when I tried it (but then I had the impression that my old Assimil edition isn't particularly good at making it seem less difficult). I read somewhere that Persian shares quite a lot with Spanish in terms of grammar?
Yeah Persian grammar is fairly similar to that of Romance languages, especially when comparing it with a Semitic language like Arabic with a fundamentally very different grammar. Another thing I forgot to mention is that Persian phonology is much easier (for Indo-European speakers) than Arabic. There's none of the pharyngeal consonants; just [x] and [ɣ~ʁ], both of which you probably already have in your phonetic inventory.
Car wrote:The problem is that I can't roll my Rs, though, so how would I distinguish them from [ʁ]?
eskandar wrote:Car wrote:The problem is that I can't roll my Rs, though, so how would I distinguish them from [ʁ]?
Persian has a flap [ɾ], much like the Spanish single R as in hacer. If you can produce something like this for ر (R) and distinguish between that and ق/غ (Q), the latter of which can be realized as [ɣ], [ʁ], or [ɢ], you'll be in good shape.
Car wrote:Unfortunately, no. Are there minimal pairs between the two?
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