The difference between written Persian and the Persian people speak is a set of rules rather than a second vocabulary, and that is the most useful fact in this subject. Six or seven regular conversions turn one register into the other, they can be written on a card, and learning them is a fortnight rather than a second language.
Almost no course says this early enough, so a learner who has done everything the book asked arrives at a conversation and finds that half of it has been rewritten by rules nobody mentioned.
The five changes that convert one register into the other
These are regular. Learn them as a set and a large amount of written Persian becomes speakable and a large amount of spoken Persian becomes readable.
- ast becomes e. Is, the commonest verb in the language, is reduced to a single vowel attached to the word before it.
- miravam becomes miram, I go, and this contraction applies to almost every verb in the present.
- ra becomes ro after a vowel and o after a consonant, so the object marker is barely audible.
- an becomes un, everywhere. Nan becomes nun, bread; Tehran becomes Tehrun. This single change accounts for an enormous share of what a learner fails to recognise.
- nan becomes nun is worth stating on its own because bread is a word you will hear on the first day and will not find in that shape in any textbook.
- the written form is never spoken outside broadcast news and formal speeches, so a course that teaches only it has prepared you for a register you will rarely hear.
The conversions, and they are regular
The vowel written as a long a becomes an u before an m or an n, so the word for bread and the name of the capital both change their vowel. The verb to be contracts and attaches itself to the word in front of it rather than standing separately. Common verbs contract their own middles, so a four syllable form becomes two. The object marker shortens after a consonant and shortens differently after a vowel. Third person endings reduce. The plural ending loses its final vowel.
None of that is optional or careless, and none of it is regional slang. It is what educated speakers in Tehran say in every ordinary sentence, including newsreaders once the camera stops, and the written forms are what those same speakers write.
Which means the two registers are a pair rather than a standard and a deviation. Producing the written forms in speech is not correct, it is marked: it sounds like reading aloud, and it is the single clearest sign of somebody who learned Persian from a book.
Learning the spoken forms and refusing to say them
Here is the stall and it comes from a reasonable instinct. A learner who has worked hard on the written forms meets the spoken ones, files them as informal or as sloppy, and declines to produce them, on the grounds that the book form is the real Persian.
What follows is somebody who writes well, reads well and speaks like a document, and who also fails to understand ordinary speech, because refusing to produce a form goes with refusing to learn it. Both halves of that are avoidable and neither is corrected in conversation, since the written forms are perfectly comprehensible. The exit is to assign the registers deliberately: spoken forms for anything said to a person, written forms for anything written, with no exceptions for a month, until the two stop bleeding into each other. Making a rule rather than relying on judgement is the same move that works for any two systems held at once, described in the stalls every learner hits, and the way through each.
Two registers, two jobs
Which form belongs where, and what mixing them costs
Neither pan is more correct. Educated speakers write the left and say the right, and a learner doing the reverse is marked in both directions.
- The written formsEverything you read, and everything you write
- Books, newspapers, official language
- A formal speech, read aloud
- Where the Arabic derived vocabulary concentrates
- What every course teaches, almost exclusively
- The spoken formsEverything said to a person, by everybody
- Conversation, at every level of society
- Television drama and film
- A newsreader, once the camera stops
- Produced by rules you can learn in a fortnight
Assign each register a job and keep to it for a month
Using the left pan in speech is the error learners actually make, and it is not corrected, because the written forms are perfectly comprehensible. It simply sounds like somebody reading aloud.
Two things to convert with
A one page conversion table is the whole apparatus, and building it yourself is better than finding one, because writing the rules out is most of the learning. It replaced discovering each conversion separately over a year, which is the usual route and which never assembles them into a system. Free, and the table is short enough to keep in a wallet for the first month.
Persian television drama is the material to apply it to. It replaced the recorded textbook dialogue, which is written Persian performed aloud and therefore contains none of this. Free where you can find it, and the exercise is narrow: pause on a sentence, write down what was said, then write down what the same sentence would look like in the book, and name which rules made the difference. Twenty of those and the conversion stops being a computation.
The mistake: waiting for the register to arrive on its own
The spoken forms are absorbed eventually by anybody living in the language, and a learner outside it can wait a very long time, because almost all written material and almost all teaching material is in the other register. Waiting is therefore not a neutral choice; it is a choice to keep learning the half you already have.
Learning the rules directly costs a fortnight and inverts the situation immediately, because the conversion runs both ways: knowing it lets you produce the spoken form and, more importantly at first, lets you recognise a written form inside something you just heard. That recognition is what turns listening practice from noise into practice, which is why this page comes before Tehrani speech, and the vowels it swallows rather than after it.
What the two registers sit on
Several of the conversions apply to verb forms, and the same forms carry the stress exceptions, so the two subjects overlap almost completely, in stress that sits at the end, and what the spelling hides. The verbs being contracted are mostly compounds of a noun and a light verb, in no gender, no cases, and one of the tidiest verb systems anywhere. The written register is also where the Arabic-derived vocabulary concentrates, so register and word origin move together, in the Arabic layer, and the words English quietly took. And none of the written forms can be read at all without supplying the missing vowels, in thirty two letters, joined, with the vowels left for you to supply.