Persian is written in a modified Arabic script and borrows heavily from Arabic vocabulary, which leads many people to assume the languages are related. They are not. Persian is Indo-European — a distant cousin of English, sharing ancestry with Hindi, Greek and Russian.
Once past the script, the grammar is strikingly light.
What Persian does not have
| Feature | Persian |
|---|---|
| Grammatical gender | none — one word for he and she |
| Noun cases | none |
| Definite article | none |
| Adjective agreement | none |
| Irregular plurals (native) | almost none — add -hâ |
| Verb irregularity | limited; endings are fully regular |
The pronoun او (u) covers he and she alike. Plurals are formed by adding -hâ to essentially any noun: ketâb (book) → ketâbhâ.
Verbs are regular where it counts
Persian verbs have two stems — present and past — and the personal endings are identical across every verb in the language.
| Person | Ending | raftan (to go), past |
|---|---|---|
| man (I) | -am | raftam |
| to (you) | -i | rafti |
| u (he/she) | — | raft |
| mâ (we) | -im | raftim |
| shomâ (you pl.) | -id | raftid |
| ânhâ (they) | -and | raftand |
Those six endings work for every verb. The only thing to memorise per verb is the present stem, which is not always predictable from the infinitive — raftan has present stem rav-, giving miravam, I go.
The ezâfe links everything. An unwritten short vowel -e connects a noun to what modifies it: ketâb-e man (my book), ketâb-e khub (good book), dar-e khâne (the door of the house). It is rarely written, so readers supply it from knowing the grammar — one of the first things to internalise.
Word order and compounds
Persian is subject-object-verb, so the verb closes the sentence:
| Persian | Literally | English |
|---|---|---|
| man ketâb mikhânam | I book read | I read a book. |
| u be khâne raft | he to house went | He went home. |
A great many everyday verbs are compounds of a noun plus a light verb, which means learning a handful of light verbs unlocks a large amount of vocabulary:
| Persian | Parts | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| kâr kardan | work + to do | to work |
| harf zadan | speech + to hit | to speak |
| dust dâshtan | friend + to have | to like, to love |
| telefon kardan | phone + to do | to phone |
The script
Persian uses the Arabic script plus four letters for sounds Arabic lacks: پ p, چ ch, ژ zh, گ g. Letters join and change shape by position, and short vowels are normally omitted, as in Arabic and Hebrew.
Persian also simplifies the sounds of its Arabic borrowings. Arabic has several letters that Persian pronounces identically — ث, س and ص are all s; ذ, ز, ض and ظ are all z. That makes reading easier and spelling harder, since one sound has several possible spellings determined by etymology.
Words you already know
The Indo-European connection surfaces in basic vocabulary:
| Persian | English |
|---|---|
| mâdar | mother |
| pedar | father |
| barâdar | brother |
| dokhtar | daughter |
| nâm | name |
| do | two |
English has also borrowed from Persian: paradise, bazaar, caravan, pyjama, lemon, candy, khaki and divan all trace back to it.
The realistic assessment
Persian rewards early effort unusually well. Front-load the script — it is the only real barrier — and the grammar behind it is among the most approachable of any major language. Learners commonly report forming correct sentences far sooner than they expected, precisely because there is no gender, no case and no agreement to get wrong.
Look up Persian offline
The free English-Persian Dictionary covers everyday vocabulary in Persian script, working entirely without a connection.
Open the dictionary appFrequently asked questions
Is Persian related to Arabic?
No. Persian is Indo-European, in the same broad family as English, Hindi and Russian. It adopted the Arabic script after the Islamic conquest and borrowed a large body of Arabic vocabulary, but the grammar is entirely unrelated — Persian has no case system, no dual number and no root-and-pattern morphology.
Are Farsi and Persian the same thing?
Yes. Farsi is the language's own name for itself; Persian is the established English name. Dari in Afghanistan and Tajik in Tajikistan are varieties of the same language, with Tajik written in Cyrillic.
How hard is the Persian script?
Moderate. It runs right to left, letters change shape by position, and short vowels are usually omitted — the same challenges as Arabic. Persian adds four letters Arabic lacks. Most learners read slowly within a few weeks and fluently over months.