Talk:Persian

Mislabelled Picture
The picture is mislabeled as Chehel Sultan. It is Chehel Sotoon. See text from wiki article on Esfahan: Chehel Sotoun (also Chehel Sotoon, Persian: چهل ستون) is a charming pavilion in the middle of a park at the far end of a long pool, in Isfahan, Iran, built by Shah Abbas II to be used for the Shah's entertainment and receptions. In this palace, Shah Abbas II and his successors would receive dignitaries and ambassadors, either on the terrace or in one of the stately reception halls.

The name, "Forty Columns," was inspired by the twenty slender wooden columns supporting the entrance pavilion, which, when reflected in the waters of the fountain, are said to appear to be forty.

Cheers, KR

This book need improve!
This book need improve, just one lesson? I can't learn from it nothing!

Writing lessons
I would really like to see lessons teaching how to read and write Persian step-by-step, rather than just a table showing all the letters. It's hard to learn from a table. The lack of examples is another problem, but even if there were examples after the table the learning situation would be far from perfect because the student would still have to memorise all letters at once in order to be able to begin practising.

What I have found really useful when learning non-Latin alphabets is a "divide and conquer" method that introduces few letters at a time and offers example words for practise immediately after each letter / each set of letters. What's even better is if those example words are understandable without prior knowledge of the language, that is, international words. For example: names of countries, cities or famous people (if their name isn't significantly different in Persian than in English), common personal names, Persian words that have entered English, English words that are used in Persian, words that both Persian and English have derived from Greek or Latin... The advantage of using these words is that students will be able to quickly see their own progress and the whole learning process becomes as fascinating as solving a puzzle. See the "Read Write and Pronounce Greek" lessons in the Modern Greek Wikibook for an example, or this external page on Cyrillic.

If you'd like to try this approach for teaching the Persian alphabet, I'd be glad to help you, even though I don't know Persian (I can read the Arabic alphabet ok though). Just create a big list of suitable words on a planning page like Modern Greek/Writing lessons plan, answer me here and I'll try to find an optimal order for letters.

Thanks for your efforts to teach a language that is hard to find in European schools!

Junesun 16:28, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

P.S.: If there's somebody generally unsure about how to create good language lessons, I really recommend reading the following two pages about it: Authoring Foreign Language Textbooks and Authoring Foreign Language Textbooks/Bite-sized language lessons.

Spacing/Characters
I'm not a technical expert, so I'm unsure why, but for some reason the full characters are not always being displayed. For instance, the word "Farsi" in the Persian alphabet is not displaying correctly, as the "fe" is not fully showing up. --Dpr 19:33, 9 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Is it on the cover where it is not displaying correctly, i.e. underneath the big image? I can see some places where some letters don't display properly, although for me the "farsi" displays properly on the front page.Poppy 20:39, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Make Persian fonts bigger
Could somebody increase the size of persian fonts. For example at Persian/Phrasebook I have to increase the zoom of Firefox very much to be able to see if a character has 1, 2, or 3 dots. But then the size of the english words is so big that the table doesn't fit on my screen anymore. --188.109.88.23 (talk) 10:31, 29 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I have boosted the font by 50% in the Persian/Phrasebook. If this is acceptable, you could apply it to tables on other pages. The case of scripts outside of tables looks more tricky, and just increasing the browser font size may be better. Recent Runes (talk) 11:28, 29 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, it's much better now. I still have to increase the font size in Firefox, but not that much anymore. --188.109.94.117 (talk) 09:38, 30 May 2010 (UTC)