Hashimi wrote:Have you looked at "Modern Persian" by Simin Abrahams?
It was used for teaching Persian to first year students at Edinburgh University and it has audio cassettes. Sample page from lesson 10:
That looks great. I added it to my Amazon list the next time I need to add something new to Persian.
I also recently discovered L'Asiatheque's offering "Manuel de Persan" to be a fantastic coursebook.
After the first few lessons it introduces the script and you get in each chapter a long series of narrations, grammar, pattern exercises, and a conversation. Full pages of Persian in the later lessons. There are four CD's which boast almost 5 hours of recording, but I'm sure once you take out the silent gaps and some French instructions it will be less than that - but they must have recorded the entirety of the material.
The website says this is Volume 1, but it was published in 1997 and no news about a Volume 2, so who knows. Either way, I need to get my French up to where I can buy and use this. If someone already knows French, this might be a great place to start.
However, one caveat is that this book follows the convention of writing the spoken form of Persian. That is to say, there are certain sound shifts (most notably long a to u) in colloquial speech, and this is one of the coursebooks that uses this method. Iran, for example, is spelled "irun" - something you would never see in real Persian. It's like if an English text were to teach "I wanna" instead of "I want to."
Edit: Removed oversize image, added caveat on colloquial form of this book.
