Superbly written!!!, September 18, 2004

Colloquial Persian is an incredible introduction to spoken and written Farsi. The grammar points are clear and concise with no confusing jargon, and the content layout is very well structured. New vocabulary and grammar points are introduced after each dialogue, but this never makes things confusing (as a previous reviewer suggested), and in fact most modern language books are structured in this way.

A finely tuned masterpiece!

pretty good introduction, February 12, 2004

this is a decent introduction to spoken and written modern Farsi. I really did like it.
My two points of contention is that the written, atleast in the beginning and with the vocabulary does NOT include the vowel marks, i felt it would be more useful if all vocab and sentences in the first few chapters utilized vowel marks. makes life a tad bit easier.
I ended up not even focusing on the written and JUST used the book for the spoken

my other point of contention is that
they use the letter "x" for the "kh" sound, which is fairly gutterial...i felt it was alittle confusing.

This book teaches you both the polite spoken based more on the written (people will think ur really cute!) and slowly introduces alittle of the actual way its spoken (sound changes and whatnot)

but overall a really good book and introduction

Really good book to learn spoken persian, February 23, 2003

Good points are: lessons are short, everyday life situations, good introduction of written persian, dialogues on the CDs are fast (and thus are close to real world situations), answers to exercises, english-persian dictionary. Also, the book is well structured.
Someone complained about the fact that people had to look up words frequently in the dictionary, that's true but you should write a list of all the words on a sheet and learn it anyway.
I first tried to learn persian with a french book but they switch to written persian at lesson 7. So it requires you to learn scripting early, which is a bad idea i think. This book lets you learn spoken persian.

Needs better editing, January 18, 2003
Reviewer: A reader
A self-teaching book should be user-friendly and not leave the reader thumbing through the vocabularies to find undefined words. Unfortunately, this book violates that rule in the very first chapter. However, I think it is in some ways a vast improvement over most other Persian books, which are either too scholarly, too dry, or too simplistic. This book falls somewhere in the middle, and with a little careful editing it may become a four-star or five-star item.

A GOOD IDEA BUT POORLY DONE, October 12, 2002

After having bought several Persian self help books(most were of the literary form of Persian), this was a welcome attempt to fill the gap with the colloquial form. The only other colloquial book I have seen of merit is also from Rutledge publishers, but writen in roman transliteration. However, this new book written with Farsi script sadly falls into the same traps as many other language self help books, by constantly introducing new grammatical forms and vocabulary before explaining them; causing the reader to stop and try to look up an explaination somewhere else in the book- very frustrating.
Also, it give too much emphasis on slangy social etiquette forms early in the book used in meeting, greeting, introductions, etc. which also create frustrations when an adult learner tries to analize their structures grammatically.
Also, the vocabulary at end of book is not consistant with the words given in exercises, especially the English-Persian half.
Tapes are adecuate, thank goodness, and the whole set being the only "game in town"(using Farsi script colloquially),gives the nod to this purchase until someone else comes alone with a better version.

The best introductory Persian lesson book on the market., August 18, 2002

Of all the introductory Persian lesson books on the market, this one is the best. It is better than Thackston's "An Introduction to Persian", which can be quite forbidding for beginners. It differs from the aforementioned in that it's emphasis is on spoken Persian rather than written Persian. However, that said, neither book does much to teach you how to read or write. They should be viewed more as refreshers and practice guides for people who know how to speak the language to an extent but don't read or write very well if at all. Moreover, Rafiee's book comes with a key to the exercises and a cassette to aid in pronunciation, which Thackston's book lacks.