This book is excellent for those who want to gain a good working knowledge of Persian. I qualify this assessment wilth the following:1. You should have a good working knowledge of the alphabet beforehand. The book is poor in teaching you this effectively. So get a moderate handle on the alphabet and then dive into this book. The exercises will give you the additional practice you need as you go along.
2. For the growing population in the West who are of Persian descent and have a hodge-podge knowledge of Persian (like I had), this book is for you. I'd recommend it over the 2 or 3 texts that have become standards of Persian instruction. Why? Because it has much better exercises (none of this rote translation of 10 sentences from Perisan to English or vice versa)and allows the student to begin trying yo express him/herself in the Perisan they have learned to that point.
3. This is a great text with the help of a tutor. If you have a tutor, this book runs circles around the Lambton, Thackston books if what you want is basic Persian proficiency. It gives one the chance of trying out the Persian on their own with the exercises. The latter's exercises are rote translations of sentences.
I gave this book a 4 rating because there is alot of room out there for someone to pick up the mantle and create Persian language learning materials that are at the same level as those for Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, or Portuguese, to name a few. This book tries to make that jump, and with a major revision could probably do so. The shame in all of this is that it is practically out of print and barely out of its teenage years, while the dinosaurs remain.
The book uses practically no transcription of Persian into the Latin alphabet -- which is a good thing. The other texts that I have seen do this throughout the book and I don't understand why. If you are in Lesson 10 of a Persian textbook, for example, the student should be able to get along in the alphabet of the language without any Latin alphabet crutches, aside from some unique point that requires it. If the student really needs this type of alphabet assistance that is given throughout these books, they need more alphabet and writing review rather than learning new verbs and sentence structures. If you want to read a newspaper like Kayhan or some other real-world prose or read a sign in Tehran, you won't have that type of help there.
The biggest help to a student from any of these books, Windfuhr's included, is a serious look at the colloquial Persian that everyday people speak both in Iran and in the diaspora. While proficiency in standard, formal Persian is very important, many learners get frustrated when they try to use it conversationally only to find out that the pronunciation and form of what they are trying to say is quite different in spoken Persian. The student needs to know this at the beginning, rather than as a 5-page appendix at the end of some texts.
