Farsi Dictionary & Phrasebook, by Nicholas Awde & Camilla Shahribaf

This book is a short book that lives up to its authors goals, and is part of a larger set of materials designed to help English speakers to read, speak, and understand at least some Farsi. By no means will this book makes its reader an expert in Farsi, even if its ideal reader owns the book and is able to take notes and compare what is written here rather briefly with the insight of a native speaker, rather than being in the position of having to return the book all too quickly to the library as is the case with me. That said, the book itself does manage to do at least a decent job at introducing the reader to some basic Persian grammar and vocabulary and it also touches upon the tricky matter of the letters that Persian has which English does not and which make hearing and speaking Persian a challenge for Americans who struggle with trilling rrrs (unless they happen to speak Spanish and know of the rr letter there), the glottal stops and guttural kh, as well as the tricky guttural gh, which is usually (and poorly) transliterated as q in English texts. This book is a modest one but deserves some points for effort, at least.

It is very easy for this reader, at least, to wish of things that could have been in this book, and that would be in a larger book or set of books on the subject of Persian and its instruction into English. A discussion of Persian dialects and related languages, so that people would be able to come to an understanding of how the Persian language is different if one is learning a Tehrani accent or one from another part of Iran, or one is seeking to learn how to understand Dari (spoken in the area of Herat in Afghanistan) or Tajik (a related language spoken mainly in Tajikistan and neighboring areas of the Ferghana valley in Central Asia). It would be excellent to examine the history of Persian and see how its poetry played a major role in allowing it an independent existence to Arabic, which nonetheless heavily influenced the language. A look at the broader Iranian influence into the languages of the world would also be helpful, but is far beyond the scope of this work. Given the bad relations that have long existed between the United States and Iran, it is perhaps unsurprising that there are so few books available to the ordinary person that seek to make Farsi (Persian) more familiar to the native English speaker, but this book is a good start, if by no means all that one would want.

In terms of its contents, this book is a slim volume that begins with a short introduction, a very basic grammar, a pronunciation guide, and a brief look at the Farsi alphabet. This is followed by a very short Farsi-English dictionary and then an English-Farsi dictionary. The rest of the book, a bit more than 100 pages, is made up of words and phrases organized thematically, with the following extensive set of themes: etiquette, quick reference, introductions, language, bureaucracy, travel, accommodations, food and drink, directions, shopping, sights, finance, communications, the office, the conference, education, agriculture, animals, the countryside, weather, camping, emergencies, healthcare, relief and aid, tools, cars, sports, the body, politics, dates and times, numbers, and opposites. The words and phrases that the book discusses sometimes come with discussion on certain cultural aspects of Iran, which note helpfully (for example) that alcohol is not supposed to be available in the country, although it could be found by those who are looking for it in the right places and in the right company. The book ends with a map of Iran that is filled with cites, as well as other books by the publisher that someone may want to order and read.