How to easily learn the Persian alphabet
In the past week or so I decided to seriously try learning the Persian alphabet. I did not bother learning the actual Arabic alphabet because, as Greg Cochran says, there is no such thing as even an Arab Belgium. Meanwhile, Persian had historic literary status even in Turkey and Pakistan/India. The only reason I wrote this post was because nobody in the heavily Elite Human Capital loaded Manifold Markets fake money prediction markets site knew the Perso-Arabic alphabet.
The alphabet is extremely straightforward and logical. If one knows what one’s doing, it can easily be learned in a week -probably faster than the Korean alphabet, due to the Persian language’s lack of strange sounds. There are numerous repeat sounds (e.g., s and z) for historical reasons, but this adds only a bit more time to learning the alphabet.
Despite the alphabet’s relative simplicity, Iran’s literacy rate as of the nineteenth century was very low -5% to be generous, probably not much above that of Tajikistan. The best reason for this is that the right to left (shoulder dominant) writing direction of the Persian alphabet, though remarkably good for speedwriting, resulted in lower back damage and reduced fertility among the scribal class over time (the “hunchback” ED-209 robot in Robocop famously stands for “Erectile Dysfunction - Fresno”). Thus, Iran’s literacy rate in 1950 was just 13% (in comparison that of historically Buddhist Thailand, which has a similar average IQ, was 54%, and Burma had the highest literacy rate in British India). The reason I bothered learning the Persian alphabet is because (prior to c. 1850), Iran has been more influential than Japan (which had a “special path” in creating a relatively simple writing system with a chin up writing direction -katakana). I didn’t bother learning the Urdu alphabet (an expanded version of the Persian) because, according to a poster on the Language Simp Discord server,
No one uses the alphabet now
At least casually
They write urdu in the English script
Here's an example: How are you is written as "kaise ho?"
If you can speak urdu well then you can write it in the English script and you don't need to worry about spellings and stuff because it isn't the official script
The first thing one has to remember when learning the Persian alphabet is that the Persian alphabet primarily relies on dots to distinguish letters. 18 of the 32 characters have dots in them. The reason the be letter has one dot under it, while the pe letter has three dots is because the ye letter, when in the beginning or middle of a word, has two dots under it. The reason the te letter has two dots above it, while the se letter has three, is because the nun letter has one dot above it.
The best way to learn the isolated letters is to simply listen through children’s songs such as this one:
The second thing one has to remember is that the letters are generally modified by their position in a word. The best way to learn the non-isolated letters is simply to go through this video while looking up the letters in this list in WikiBooks:
Of course, it also helps to write out the alphabet on paper while indicating the sounds in the Latin alphabet next to the Persian letters. If one has very bad handwriting in the left to right writing direction, one should be expected to have much better handwriting in the right to left writing direction.
There are only three vowel marks outside the generally used alphabet, which are described from this screenshot of Dr. Know:
