tl;dr:
- Baizoyev & Howard’s Beginners Guide to Tajiki
- Read Tajik News
- Chat with natives (Iranian, Afghan and Tajik)
- Lambton’s Persian Grammar
- Read and chat some more
Learn Persian in a Year
whoever will study the Persia language according to my plan, will in less than a year be able to translate and to answer any letter from an Indian prince, and to converse with the natives of India, not only with fluency, but with elegance - William Jones
The genius and promise of Persian is its simple, welcoming grammar, which ties a wide vocabulary and arcane orthographies into a thousand years of sublime literature.
To speak Persian is easier than Spanish, but to read harder than Latin. The Arabic script is simple enough, with 32 letters, learnable in a day. Yet the lay opinion is correct, the script is the student’s biggest hurdle for it leaves half the vowels unmarked and breaks my method of language learning. This means when reading, you must look up nigh every new word to know its pronunciation. In 1792, Edward Moises already suggested not trying and just saying e everywhere. But this isn’t the only way:
You see, Tajiki Persian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, marking every single vowel letting you read the vast riches of Persian literature, confident in the pronunciation, useful for extensive reading and Sprachgefühl. Spoken Tajik (like Afghani) is closer to classical, literary Persian than colloquial Iranian Persian, which e.g. modifies many sound combinations in a consistent way. Either way, the student first learns the literary form then rules for transforming it into colloquial speech (provided by most grammars early on).
If you want to get your feet wet first, Elwell-Sutton’s 1941 Colloquial Persian is the best start, a breezy transliterated introduction teaching the entire spoken language (though lacking dialogues, hence the need for Tajik.)
Baizoyev & Howard’s Beginners Guide to Tajiki is the best start, hands down, although some students may initially want to skip the deeply cultural vocabulary without Western equivalent. If you speak Russian, Самоучитель Таджикского Языка - Махадов or Учебник Таджикского Языка - Ивавнов, Семенова,Хушкадамова are fantastic!
After either, you may start reading Tajiki FB groups, news sites and PDFs with wiktionary.
When you feel curious and ready to read the traditional script, Lambton’s Persian Grammar explains spelling rules, introduces historical usage etc. like nothing else.
Finally, Philott’s Higher Persian Grammar is the most in depth (English) reference of Persian.