Seven Persian Verb Tenses

I completed the lesson I'm posting today to serve as a reference for the rules associated with different verb tenses in Persian. Included are the; simple present, continuous present, perfect present, simple past, continuous past, perfect past, and future tenses. This was a big help to me as a moved on to writing more complex Farsi sentences, so I hope you find it useful.

 

 

 

 

Persian Sentences with Multiple Adjectives

The Persian language notes/homework I'm uploading today expand on the previously mentioned fact that in Persian, adjectives follow the nouns they describe. Enjoy!

Soheil's corrections are in colored pen. I hope these examples prove useful!

News Post: May 24, 2013

The dominating story in Iran this week has been the announcement of the final presidential candidates approved by the Guardian Council. Nearly seven hundred would be candidates registered, but after the Council (who is responsible for vetting candidates) completed their review, eight presidential hopefuls remained.

Also, I thought it would be helpful if I started highlighting and underlining some vocabulary key to understanding the article. I'll provide the vocabulary after articles.

 

8 کاندیدای انتخابات ریاست جمهوری از فیلتر شورای نگهبان عبور کردند

  ۸ نفر از ثبت نام کنندگان انتخابات ریاست جمهوری از فیلتر شورای نگهبان عبور کرده‌اند و تا ساعاتی دیگر اسامی آنها توسط وزارت کشور اعلام می‌شود.

در میان اسامی ارسالی به وزارت کشور نام اسفندیار رحیم مشایی و اکبر هاشمی رفسنجانی وجود ندارد.

حداد عادل، محمد باقر قالیباف محسن رضایی، علی اکبر ولایتی، سعید جلیلی، محمد غرضی، حسن روحانی و محمدرضا عارف صلاحیت‌شان احراز شده است

 

 

The article above comes from the website khedmat.ir, which is closely associated with current Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

 

Title Translation:

Eight candidates for the presidency passed the filter (vetting/review) of the Guardian Council

 

Article Summary:

 

Line One: Eight presidential registrants have been approved by the Guardian Council and will be announced in a few hourse by the Interior Ministry.

Line Two: Names not announced as approved to run (and very notably absent) are Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei (Ahmadinejad's former chief of staff and the candidate he has strongly backed) and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (former Iranian president, reform candidate, and very prominent Iranian politician).

Line Three: The eight, approved presidential candidates are; Haddad Adel, Mohammad Bagher Ghaleebaf, Mohsen Rezaee, Ali Akbar Velayati, Mohammad Gharazy**, Hassan Roohani, and Mohammad Reza Aref . 

 

Key Vocab:

 

(candidate) کاندیدا

(election) انتخابات

(president) ریاست جمهوری

(council) شورا

(guardian council) شورای نگهبان 

(to cross, in this case 'they crossed' means they were approved) عبور کردن 

 

The news that Mashaei and Rafsanjani would not be allowed to run made major headlines in Iran and provoked strong reactions from the camps of both candidates, who are both holding out hope that they will be re-instated and allowed to run. I will follow this post with an article from each of the blocked candidates' camps that describes their reactions.

 

 

 

 

Some High Level Persian Grammar Notes

Before I start posting any Persian grammar or vocab work I've done, I should mention that this site isn't intended to teach Persian from the ground up. As a  current Farsi student, I think I'd be getting well ahead of myself if I started trying to teach anyone else the language. I do, however, wish to share the work that I do in the hopes that it might benefit others who are learning Persian. You'll be able to see my mistakes, see groupings of new vocab, and see compilations of grammatical tenses. For any native Persian speakers who happen upon this blog, I'm sure you'll be able to get a laugh out of some of my practice and homework sentences (some weeks I'm better than others).

Anyone who's interested in learning some Persian online should definitely check out the site http://www.easypersian.com. It starts with the Persian alphabet and then provides a ton of information.

Having said all of that, here are some high level notes on the first topics I reviewed with my tutor Soheil. This will give you an idea of where I stood when I returned to Farsi lessons in November of 2012.

In our first few lessons, Soheil reviewed some foundational characteristics of Farsi. Like when to use 'را' after direct objects (I think this is universally challenging for many native English speakers learning Persian), and the all important fact that in Persian, unlike in English, nouns come before the adjectives that describe them.

In English, we would say "the fast, red car." In Persian, the order would be "car red fast." 
 

Blog Introduction

After receiving some feedback following my first post, I realize I probably should have kicked this thing off with some information about myself and why I created this blog. So here it goes:

My name is Jordan and I started graduate school in January 2013 after a five year stint in consulting. I really enjoyed the challenges consulting presented; working in a variety of industries, solving unique problems, and designing business solutions. However, my passions have always been international affairs and language, so here I am back in school.

A couple of years before I started grad school, I hired a private tutor at a language school and began studying Persian/Farsi (I'll use those interchangeably on this site). My tutor was a native speaker who taught me the Persian alphabet, vocab, and how to write sentences in the simple present, simple past, and future tenses. My tutoring and Persian studies, though, were cut short when I was offered a consulting assignment in the Netherlands for a year.

When I returned home, I was pretty out of practice as far as Persian goes. I made an appointment with the Persian professor at the university where I planned to enroll, and she recommended that I take some lessons as a refresher prior to joining the Spring Persian 2 class. I was referred to a doctoral student at my university, Soheil, who is a Farsi native speaker.

I've been taking lessons with Soheil since that time (November 2012), first as a refresher and then to compliment the coursework of my Persian class. The idea for this blog came out of one of our Farsi lessons. I told Soheil I wanted a better way to keep track of and share the language work we do. He thought a valuable next step in my Persian studies would be reading and interpreting articles from Persian language newspapers and magazines. The end result is this blog.

Postings will either be related to grammar and vocab lessons we've completed, or stories that would otherwise be inaccessible to non-Persian speakers. My hope is that sharing some of these news stories will help broaden the understanding of Iran for anyone who happens to read this blog. As I've gradually discovered, there is far more to the internal politics of Iran than the same two or three news lines that are picked up and dissected by international media.

Enjoy!   

News Post: May 20 2013

My first news post includes two articles and comes from the Iranian news website Tabnak (tabnak.ir). Tabnak has the highest traffic of any news site in Iran and is generally considered a credible source. The site is associated with Mohsen Rezaee, the founder of the Revolutionary Guards and current head of Iran's Expediency Discernment Council. That being the case, Tabnak could be classified as more conservative and close to the Iranian government.





A basic translation of this article's title is: Larkani withdraws his candidacy for the benefit of Jalili
This article goes on to describe how Larkani decided to end his candidacy in support of Presidential hopeful Saeed Jalili. Both men are very conservative and favored by Iranian leadership. Saeed Jalili is particularly notable for his position leading negotiations related to Iran's nuclear program. Support from other conservative candidates like Larkani, in conjunction with his favorable standing and notoriety, could make Jalili an extremely interesting candidate to watch in the coming weeks.

This article is a bit of a departure from the Iranian presidential race. The title mentions some comments made by the Iranian Minister of Communications regarding the earth's atmosphere. If you think, based on that, that the body of the article will describe the Minister's concerns about pollution or the climate, you're slightly off. The Minister states that an important discovery has been made regarding one layer of the earth's atmosphere. It has been determined, he claims, that pictures and sound can travel better through this particular layer of atmosphere. Most importantly, he goes on to assure that when the hidden Imam of Shia Islam reveals himself, he will be able to broadcast his message to the entire world using this atmospheric layer... The article's author not only calls the Minister out on the stupidity of his statements, but criticizes him for tying important religious figures to wild claims easily proven incorrect.