Learn to read Persian, starting from the alphabet

Who this is for

• You are starting from zero

  You do not speak Persian and the script is entirely new. The first orientation explains direction and pronunciation before asking you to recognize anything.

• You read, but every line costs you

  A name, a street sign, a headline: fine, given a moment. A whole page is work. We go back to the marks most people skip and stay there until reading them stops being a decision.

How it works

1. 1

   Letters, and all four of their shapes

   A Persian letter looks different at the start of a word, in the middle, at the end and standing on its own. You meet all four at once (ب ـب ـبـ بـ), so none of them catches you out later.

2. 2

   The vowel marks, in red

   اَ اِ اُ sit above and below the letters, and ordinary print drops them after first grade. You learn them first. They are the reason you can say a word you have never seen before.

3. 3

   Real words from the first-grade primer

   The words Iranian children read on their first day of school: آب، بابا، نان. Short, common, and worth having on their own.

The first words you'll read

• آب

  ---

  vand
• نان

  ---

  brød
• من

  ---

  jeg
• تو

  ---

  du

Four words in and you're reading. That is the point of starting here.

Nothing leaves your phone

There is no account and no sign-up. Your progress is written to your own browser, and it stays there.

• No account, no email, no password.
• No analytics. No tracking. Nothing is fetched from outside servers.
• Progress is kept in the browser's own storage (localStorage).
• Clear your browser data and it's gone. There is no copy on a server to lose.

Where this is right now

Open the app View the code on GitHub

Apache-2.0, free, built by Cocode.