Are you interested in learning Farsi? Luckily, Toronto is probably one of the best places you can do so. There are many resources available that you can take advantage of.

 

  1. If you a Farsi heritage speaker, meaning that you learn Farsi in the home while using another language for day to day life, you might know how to talk but if your writing and reading skills are lacking or none, the best place for you is Farsi Schools. These schools which run on weekends provide people aged 7-18 with a chance to enhance their writing and reading skills by studying the same textbooks students in Iran study in school. This gives you the chance to not only improve your skills but also learn technical names in each subject and the materials Farsi speakers all know because of the education system.                           Picture of Toronto Farsi School students in the Noroz festival.
  2. If you are older than 18 or can’t go to school or you are not a heritage language user you can always use textbooks from the library. The University of Toronto has very good textbooks for Farsi leaners that you can use. here is a short list of some I found interesting and useful:
  • Modern Persian, elementary level by Gernot Windfuhr and Hassan Tehranisa

I love the approach of this book. It totally considers the fact that the book audience is people unfamiliar with Farsi ( or at least the writing system) and teaches the writing system using similar concepts as they are used in English. I remember when I was learning English we had to use the baseline and the 3 bands to learn where each alphabet is compared to the rest but it was strange for me because in Farsi we only use one line from the very beginning. This book theorizes a way that you can learn the Farsi alphabet using 4 bands and a baseline and I was amazed by this creativity.

 

                                                       Figure 4

What is even more wonderful about this book is that not only you can borrow it from Robarts but there is also an online version offered at Hathi Trust Digital Library.

 

if you are looking for some facts and fun learning Farsi, look no more. Modern Persian book contains many small yet interesting linguistic facts about Farsi while teaching the writing system in a fun and enthusiastic manner.

teaching alphabet shapes (Figure 5)            some historical linguistic facts (Figure 6)

 

  • Sometimes you know enough alphabet but what you need is a little more vocabulary. Well, with its 589 Farsi dictionaries U of T sure doesn’t disappoint you. Since listening to News is the hardest part of every language, you might need a little help. Especially since Iranian News sometimes use such a unique terminology that you might not understand it even if you are a native speaker. Media Persian by Dominic Parviz Brookshaw is just the dictionary that you might need. It has every kind of words that are used in News with its English equivalent which help you to understand it better. The only downfall is that you need to know the alphabets.