Hodder & Stoughton. 1973. 272 pages. ISBN-10: 0340058072; ISBN-13: 978-0340058077
Persian is an Indo-European language, that is, it is related to the tongues spoken in Western Europe. As a result of the spread of Islam after the death of the Prophet, many Arabic words were introduced into Persian, which came to be written with the Arabic alphabet; yet in its grammatical structure and its basic vocabulary Persian remains Indo- European, hence quite unlike Arabic. Persian is therefore an easy language to learn to speak ; at first the writing and reading of it seem difficult, but with the right approach you can learn even this quickly. This book attempts to teach the basis of the reading and writing, with the minimum of grammar, in the first dozen lessons ; thereafter the grammar and idiom of the language can be explored more fully. A transliteration in Roman characters is given for the first few appearances of every word, phrase or sentence, but you should try as soon as you can to pick out the words direct from the Persian script, reading them several times over to accustom your eye to the forms. Plenty of practice is given in this, in the early lessons of the book. The book is in three main parts— Alphabet, Grammar, and Vocabulary-building, and in addition it has a Key to the exercises, an Index, and vocabularies each way.
The book is called Teach'Yourself Modern Persian ; this is important. Arabic forms of speech and orthography do appear in everyday Persian talking and writing, and where they do we have mentioned them ; but there is no more need for the student of Modem Persian to learn Arabic than there is for the person learning, say, French to know Latin first.