Persian Frequency lists

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Beli Tsar
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Re: Persian Frequency lists

Postby Beli Tsar » Wed Nov 07, 2018 8:52 pm

白田龍 wrote:There's a 2000 Core vocabulary at https://www.persianpod101.com/ . I have saved it during my free premium week when I was first learning Persian.

Sounds perfect. I'll take a look, thank you.

白田龍 wrote:but I have to disagree that a frequency list without vowels is useless. Persian does not have a great number of homographs, most words only have one pronunciation that you can look up on a dictionary. (try http://www.vajehyab.com/ ) But on the other hand those frequency lists are probably useless anyway, if they list unlemmatized forms.

Yes, you definitely need lemmatised forms for this. I hadn't seen that dictionary, and that's a great help, too. The ones I have found don't have pronunciation, so it's a big improvement.
I'm aiming for spoken Persian most of all, so all these little things help!
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jonm
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Re: Persian Frequency lists

Postby jonm » Thu Nov 08, 2018 8:39 am

Beli Tsar wrote:
jonm wrote:How about you, what approach are you taking with your Anki cards?

My approach has been fairly varied so far - the focus is core vocabulary, and some basic grammar rules and verb forms. And I'm working througho one of the the memrise 'Basic Farsi' courses, which is a mix of vocabulary with sentences. The vocabulary selection isn't amazing, but I find the two-way practice with verbs in context pretty helpful, as are the word order puzzles for sentences. I don't find Persian syntax particularly intuitive!

Sounds like a great mix! That's an interesting idea to do word order puzzles to get familiar with the syntax. I don't think I'm as far along as you, so I haven't gotten to very complex sentence patterns, but I know one thing that's a bit unusual about Persian is that it's a subject-object-verb language with prepositions, whereas more often SVO languages such as English have prepositions and SOV languages have postpositions.

Beli Tsar wrote:
jonm wrote:And I see in your signature that you've been reading... Anything you'd recommend?

So far mostly easy learners stuff on LingQ. I wanted to use Readlang, but I'm enjoying having premade reader-type stuff with full audio. I wanted to get into reading quickly, since I work with Iranians and a lot of the relevant vocabulary will only come through reading relevant texts. Even the big dictionaries (I have Haim) don't have it all.

In a few weeks I'll shift to the Bible and or a classic I can get as an audiobook. Again, tracking down books in English, Farsi, and Farsi audiobook has taken a while.

I keep intending to get into a real textbook, but don't much time outside my commute.

Yeah, good beginner reading material with matching audio is such a help. I don't have that for Persian yet. Professor Arguelles recommends a few beginner readers with audio here (in the second-to-last paragraph of the second post), but I haven't tracked any of them down.

This is a little different, but I came across this site that looks pretty decent. Probably not so commute-friendly though.

That's really cool that you work with Iranians, that seems very motivating and helpful.
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mcthulhu
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Re: Persian Frequency lists

Postby mcthulhu » Thu Nov 08, 2018 7:30 pm

If you're open to a paper dictionary, the Dehgani learner's dictionary (https://smile.amazon.com/Persian-Englis ... dictionary) includes transliteration (like most Persian-English dictionaries). A feature I found particularly useful in this one is that when there are multiple Persian translations for an English word, it labels the most common form.

There are predictable vowel patterns for Arabic loanwords in Persian; if you master those patterns it will make vocabulary development a lot easier. You'll probably need/want to learn them at some point anyway.

A good source for audio pronunciation guidance is forvo.com, which should have a lot of Persian words. I don't think it provides transliteration, though.

The online Hayyim dictionary at the University of Chicago (https://dsalsrv04.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/hayyim/) includes pronunciations, e.g. بلند (boland). It's an older dictionary but you should be fine with common words. I don't know how you are with software development and scripting, but if you had an existing frequency list in softcopy you could, in theory, run a series of queries and parse the results returned to extract the transliterations, if you wanted to do a bulk conversion. On the other hand, if you were learning these words as you looked up the pronunciations, maybe one manual lookup at a time would be fine.

Ilya Frank's Website used to have a free book of Persian fairy tales with interlinear Russian translations and transliterations into Latin characters. I don't know whether the Russian would be of use to you but reading through the original Farsi and transliteration together might help. And again - it would, in theory, be possible to write a script to generate a frequency dictionary paired with Latin transliterations from that book, since the words should line up perfectly.
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Beli Tsar
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Re: Persian Frequency lists

Postby Beli Tsar » Fri Nov 09, 2018 5:43 pm

jonm wrote:Sounds like a great mix! That's an interesting idea to do word order puzzles to get familiar with the syntax. I don't think I'm as far along as you, so I haven't gotten to very complex sentence patterns, but I know one thing that's a bit unusual about Persian is that it's a subject-object-verb language with prepositions, whereas more often SVO languages such as English have prepositions and SOV languages have postpositions.

Yes, it's been quite helpful. The SOV order isn't so bad; it's all the little function words that really trip me up.
jonm wrote:Yeah, good beginner reading material with matching audio is such a help. I don't have that for Persian yet. Professor Arguelles recommends a few beginner readers with audio here (in the second-to-last paragraph of the second post), but I haven't tracked any of them down.

They all seem to be rare and extortionate and lacking their audio components. There is other stuff out there, but not much.
jonm wrote:This is a little different, but I came across this site that looks pretty decent. Probably not so commute-friendly though.

Yes, it does look good.
jonm wrote:That's really cool that you work with Iranians, that seems very motivating and helpful.

It's great. And they are all really nice too...
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Beli Tsar
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Re: Persian Frequency lists

Postby Beli Tsar » Fri Nov 09, 2018 5:46 pm

mcthulhu wrote:If you're open to a paper dictionary, the Dehgani learner's dictionary (https://smile.amazon.com/Persian-Englis ... dictionary) includes transliteration (like most Persian-English dictionaries). A feature I found particularly useful in this one is that when there are multiple Persian translations for an English word, it labels the most common form.

Good to know, thanks!
mcthulhu wrote:There are predictable vowel patterns for Arabic loanwords in Persian; if you master those patterns it will make vocabulary development a lot easier. You'll probably need/want to learn them at some point anyway.

That is a really helpful tip - though I hear Arabic vowel patterns aren't necessarily too easy.
mcthulhu wrote:The online Hayyim dictionary at the University of Chicago (https://dsalsrv04.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/hayyim/) includes pronunciations, e.g. بلند (boland). It's an older dictionary but you should be fine with common words. I don't know how you are with software development and scripting, but if you had an existing frequency list in softcopy you could, in theory, run a series of queries and parse the results returned to extract the transliterations, if you wanted to do a bulk conversion. On the other hand, if you were learning these words as you looked up the pronunciations, maybe one manual lookup at a time would be fine.

Great, thanks. It looks like software development is more useful for language learning than it has any right to be. Perhaps I should brush up my skills...
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ilmari
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Re: Persian Frequency lists

Postby ilmari » Fri Nov 09, 2018 11:25 pm

This is old, but excellent. It was reviewed as "a practical, concise record of modern Persian vocabulary".
Ann K. S. Lambton, Persian Vocabulary
https://www.amazon.com/Persian-Vocabulary-Ann-K-Lambton/dp/0521091543
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