Talk:Persian/Introduction

the link is unreachable...--140.113.91.221 07:01, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Needs Serious Reworking
This page needs serious rewriting, much of it is written from the first-person point of view and it contains some graffitti and references to Dutch.Poppy 11:22, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Moved Section here for discussion
I removed the following section to here as I do feel it makes many interesting points but they are personal to the author:

"Persian speakers and learning Persian in the west I am not a native speaker of Persian but am a devout student of Persian, I have also lived in Iran for a short time. For the serious student of Persian here in the West there are some serious problems that may arise. In Iran a westerner that can say more then hello, how are you and goodbye in Persian really stands out. On IranAir, the stewardess was surprised I could order a water-in Persian. This attitude pretty much is typical.
 * The First and most unfortunate is the native Persian speaker. It has dawned on me that whilst Persian speakers (speaking primarily of Iranians)think its really nice and interesting that a non-Iranian would learn Persian, and more often then not they are more then willing to be of help in the language. Unfortunately I have definitely seen (both here and in Iran) that after a certain point, Iranians definitely think its weird that a westerner would be interested in Persian beyond a beginners level/interest. The dichotomy is that Persian speakers rave about the beauty of the language, its ancient history, its poets, its stories, but yet also feel that a westerner would have little interest in learning their language.

Really all that exists (even in Iran) are Academic Texts which can be mind-boggling for those who are not students of Linguistics or ridiculously simplistic tourist or beginner texts. Additionally most western universities don't offer Persian. I am planning on eventually putting up a critique of the most widely available Persian textbooks.
 * The second problem is lack of materials. Unfortunately this is a HUGE problem.

Of course learning Persian can be done but it takes effort and a bit of gumption to find the texts needed and of course to find Persian speakers who are sympathetic to your efforts."

Above is not my writing but what I removed from the Introduction. Poppy 11:35, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Here is another section I have removed from the introduction as I feel it is personal to the author and makes some decicions about the book which could be better discussed here:

"Lastly and most importantly, I am not going to use any colloquial Persian at all (except for a few really common and obvious words). My reasons are thus: It seems like many of native Persian speakers think that the best way to help a newbie to the language is teach the "slangy" ways to pronounce words. In fact there are a number of teach yourself Persian books which teach ONLY colloquial Persian. I'm so totally against this because its really hard to actually grasp any language, on any level without a solid understanding of the grammar and vocabulary and additionally each region, even each city and village in Iran has their own slang, accent and way of pronouncing words, so just knowing colloquial Persian can be really confusing. Additionally when one learns standard (i.e. book-based) language, it is easier to learn slang and colloquial. I know some may disagree but this is my personal belief and my experiences relate to it. If a student of language language spends any amount of time around native speakers of that language they will inevitably pick up dialectal ways to saying things."

Poppy 13:19, 25 February 2007 (UTC)