Decent Persian online dictionaries?

[Φιλόσοφος]

I've recently started learning Persian, however a major roadblock has been finding a decent online dictionary as I completely rely on them for my language studies. At the very least it should provide full pronunciation and be able to deal with inflected forms. Does anyone know a good Persian dictionary into any of the major European languages? I would be extremely grateful to find one.

[guyome]

https://fr.glosbe.com/fa/fr

[Gordafarin2]

Glosbe is an interesting one, I use it a lot for finding example sentences but you have to be smart about it, it's not always accurate - I don't think it's checked by humans. It also doesn't tell you anything about pronunciations.

I use Farsi123 for quick FA-EN lookups, and Vajehyab for checking pronunciations and in-depth definitions (the latter is an aggregator of several different dictionaries, monolingual and FA-EN).

As far as 'being able to deal with inflected forms', I haven't encountered a dictionary that's smart enough to do that unfortunately. Part of learning the language is being able to figure out the root of the verb, or the noun without plural markers, or the formal form of a colloquial pronunciation, just like you would need for looking up in a paper dictionary. If you get really stuck, you can try Google Translate (which isn't great for Persian, but is better than nothing).

But I will be watching this thread with interest, since it's been a few years since I searched around for dictionaries, and there may be some better ones now that I don't know about

[白田龍]

Those two sites provide multi dictionary look up that include English translations:

https://vajje.com/search?query=%DA%AF%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%87
https://www.vajehyab.com/?q=%DA%AF%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%87

However the Persian-English dictionary does not seem to include pronunciation. You will need to figure out the pronunciation from the Persian-Persian entries. Not hard, but you need to be careful to choose from the right entry when there are homographs. (Hint: the عمید dictionary in vajjehyab gives you easy to read romanized pronunciations (and also the simplest Persian-Persian definitions))

As for inflected forms, luckly enough Persian morphology is very simple and straightforwad. There is only verb conjugation and a few common suffixes (-hâ, -i) you need to worry about.

In vajjehyab you can select the dictioaries on the side bar, I suggest you leave only "farhangue farsi amid" and "dikshonary ha" on, for a clearer view.

[guyome]

(...) It also doesn't tell you anything about pronunciations. (...) As far as 'being able to deal with inflected forms', I haven't encountered a dictionary that's smart enough to do that unfortunately.

Thanks for the warning about using Glosbe with some caution.
Also, maybe I just got lucky but the few words I looked up with it so far always had audio (if not the word alone, at least sentences using it). I got curious and just tested it for verbal forms (میرویم for instance). It seems to deal ok with them (although sometimes the translation is automated). But I agree with you and 白田龍, there shouldn't be much need for a dictionary dealing with inflected forms anyway.

[Φιλόσοφος]

Thanks for all of your suggestions. A good dictionary must work for you, not the other way around. Even for a comparatively simplified language such as English or Spanish, it should be able to accept inflected forms. Also, it must provide all relevant information in a succinct manner. In languages that use Semitic scripts, that means first of all pronunciation.

Another suggestion for Persian is the Langenscheidt, and it seems quite good actually. I am only a beginner in Persian, however it appears to offer accurate pronunciation as well as being able to accept inflected forms.

A good lexical tool is the most important resource for language learning. There are paradigmatic utilities for Latin, Greek, Arabic or Sanskrit. Sadly, most dictionaries are not as accomplished.

[lichtrausch]

https://www.loghatnameh.de/ is my go-to Persian dictionary. It provides pronunciation and has a pretty decent corpus.

[mcthulhu]

http://dictionary-farsi.com/, http://farsidic.com/en/lang/FaEn

There's also the Steingass Persian dictionary at https://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/steingass/, and I see that it now has both Android and iOS apps. The original version was from 1892, and there's a note that the dictionary data was updated in 2019, but I have no idea what that means. FWIW, a quick search including definitions showed umpteen entries for "tree" but nothing for "computer," as expected. So, maybe better for Persian literature than for modern vocabulary, but there is a whole lot of data there. The same site also has a 1934 edition of Hayyim at https://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/hayyim/.

You didn't ask about monolingual dictionaries, but FWIW (since you'll get there one day), Dekhoda is online, https://dehkhoda.ut.ac.ir/fa/dictionary, and there are multiple versions of Mo'in available, including one in the Microsoft Store, and https://archive.org/details/FarhangEFar ... dMoinFarsi as a PDF.

The issue of inflected forms was brought up. If you are at all comfortable with Python, the Stanza library from Stanford NLP supports Farsi lemmatization, among many other languages. pip install stanza, stanza.download('fa'), and follow the instructions on the Stanza web site to tokenize and lemmatize a sentence (or more). I'm using this to normalize dictionary queries in Jorkens now.

Stanza's dependency parser (syntax analysis for a sentence) might also be useful to a learner; I have an example script that does this on the Jorkens Wiki Python script page on GitHub. The script could probably be improved; I am by no means a Python expert.