Beginner's Dari (Persian) Book

This is a great introduction book for learning Dari. I originally gave it four stars just because the book makes learning the Persian alphabet so easy.

However, I did scale my rating back because ultimately this book suffers from the same weaknesses of many language books. It takes far too long to meaningfully introduce anything other than nouns. Fairly early on in the book you will be reading and writing paragraphs before verbs, verb conjugation, or prepositions have even been discussed. You will need an English-Persian/Persian-English dictionary and also a friend fluent in Dari to make full use of this book.

While the book does begin building your vocabulary immediately, it presents words in a fairly haphazard manner. This makes some sense in the early lessons pertaining to the alphabet. However, one you get into the meat of the book you might expect the groups of words presented at the end of the lesson to have some connection beyond simply being used in that lesson. For example why tell me the words for black and white and not any other basic colors?

I acquired this book in Kabul, Afghanistan. It seems that there are two basic Dari books aspiring foreign speakers buy in Kabul. One is this one which can be usually be found at the book shop in town, and the other is one you can buy from the kids selling books on the street. This book presents the alphabet exquisitely, but the other book presents verb conjugation early on. I would recommend getting this one first, but quickly getting both as well as a English-Persian/Persian-English dictionary.