Two flows of vocabulary matter here and they run in opposite directions. A large share of the formal and abstract vocabulary came into Persian from Arabic over several centuries, and it brought its own plural forms with it, so Persian carries two plural systems at once. In the other direction, English quietly took a long list of ordinary words from Persian, and most speakers of both languages have no idea.
The first flow is the one that costs. The second is a free discount and a good afternoon.
Six pieces of vocabulary that are social rather than lexical
- taarof, the system of ritual politeness in which an offer is made to be refused and a refusal is made to be overridden. It governs paying, entering a door and accepting food, and no amount of grammar substitutes for knowing it exists.
- ghorbunet beram, literally may I be sacrificed for you, meaning roughly you are wonderful. It is affectionate and entirely ordinary between friends and family.
- jan, dear, attached to a name: Maryam jan. It is the default way of addressing somebody warmly and its absence is noticed.
- dast, dandan and abru, hand, tooth and eyebrow, which are visibly the same words as the English ones because Persian and English are cousins. This is a genuine memory aid across a few hundred core words.
- chai, tea, and it is offered constantly and refusing it once is expected rather than final.
- dastet dard nakone, may your hand not hurt, said to thank somebody who has done something for you, especially cooked.
Arabic words arriving with Arabic grammar attached
Persian is not related to Arabic and has no root and pattern system of its own, so the borrowed words came in as whole items. What came with them is the awkward part: many Arabic nouns keep their Arabic broken plural in Persian, formed by rearranging the inside of the word rather than by adding an ending.
So a learner meets a regular Persian plural ending that works on everything, and then a set of words that take an unpredictable internal change instead, and there is no rule assigning which. In practice both forms often exist and one is more formal, which is a small mercy: the regular ending is usually acceptable and the broken plural is the literary or official choice.
The same borrowing brought the redundant consonants that make spelling hard, since Arabic distinguishes sounds Persian does not, so a word's Arabic origin usually predicts that its spelling has to be memorised. Origin, spelling difficulty and plural behaviour are three faces of one fact.
Reading the formal layer and speaking it
Here is the stall, and written material causes it. Newspapers, official language and older literature use the Arabic-derived vocabulary heavily, so a learner who builds vocabulary from reading acquires the formal half. Ordinary conversation runs on the native Persian half and on a set of everyday words that a newspaper will not use.
The symptom is being complimented on your Persian and not being followed in a shop. The exit is a change of material rather than more study, towards conversation and film and away from print, which is the same argument every language in this pillar makes and which is unusually sharp here, because the two layers are so easy to tell apart once you know that origin is what separates them. Where the everyday register actually lives is two registers, and why the book does not sound like the street.
Words in and words out
Four movements, and two of them left the language
The dates are the explanation. A familiar-looking Persian word is as likely to be an old export as a recent import.
- 600s onwardsArabic inReligion, law, abstraction, and the broken plurals that came with them
- 1000s onwardsPersian out, eastwardInto Turkish, Urdu and Hindi, where much of it still lives
- 1300s onwardsPersian out, westwardBazaar, caravan, divan, khaki, and the vocabulary of chess
- 1800s onwardsFrench and then English inTechnology, institutions, and the words that look modern because they are
The two outward movements are the free half of this page and they are worth an afternoon. They also set the right expectation, since a word that travelled out centuries ago has drifted in meaning and a word borrowed last decade has not.
Two references for a word with a history
Vajehyab aggregates several Persian dictionaries in one search, free, and the entries between them will usually tell you whether a word is native, Arabic or European in origin, along with its plural. It replaced guessing at register from feel, which is what produces the newspaper effect. Look a word up when it feels formal, because that feeling is usually right and the entry will tell you why.
Persian Wikipedia is the second and it is used as material rather than as a reference. Articles on subjects you already know give you the formal layer in quantity with the meaning already supplied, which is exactly the condition in which vocabulary sticks. It replaced reading news for vocabulary, which supplies the same register with none of the support. Free, and the honest limitation is that it will not teach you a single word anybody says at a dinner table.
The mistake: assuming the English borrowings run the other way
A learner who notices that Persian and English share words often assumes Persian took them from English, and for the modern technical vocabulary that is true. For a surprising number of ordinary words it is the reverse: paradise, bazaar, caravan, divan, khaki, pyjama, jasmine, and the vocabulary of chess all travelled outward, mostly through Arabic, Turkish or French, over several centuries.
That is not a curiosity with no use. Each of those is a word you already know in a shape close enough to recognise, and there are enough of them to be worth an afternoon of collecting, which is the cheapest vocabulary in this subject. It also sets the expectation correctly: a familiar-looking Persian word is as likely to be an old export as a new import, and the two behave differently, since the old ones have drifted in meaning and the new ones have not.
What the words still need
Every noun collected here will be used with a light verb if it names an action, and which one is a fact about the noun, in no gender, no cases, and one of the tidiest verb systems anywhere. The Arabic-derived words are the ones whose spelling has to be memorised letter by letter, in thirty two letters, joined, with the vowels left for you to supply. Their stress follows the ordinary rule and the exceptions are the ones that matter, in stress that sits at the end, and what the spelling hides. And whether a given word earns a card at all is the general question in making cards that teach rather than cards that pile up.