Learnin' Persian

For the last year or so I have, along with several of my colleagues here in Munich, been trying to learn Persian. We have a great teacher (thanks Hanif!) and have worked through the grammar of Wheeler M. Thackston, who by the way is a pretty impressive guy given that he also did a grammar for classical Arabic, plus his first name is Wheeler. This has been quite an experience. The last time I started learning a language was almost 20 years ago (Greek and Arabic while in grad school) and my brain has evidently aged quite a bit in that time - for instance it is harder to learn new vocabulary. On the bright side the purpose of this is to read Persian philosophical texts and in those quite a lot of the terminology is the same as Arabic. Persian is fascinating to learn because it is, of course, Indo-Germanic so there are structural parallels to Latin, Greek and modern European languages, plus cognates (my favorite example: the word for "bad" is "bad"; the words for family members, "father," "daughter" etc are almost exactly the same). People say that for this reason it is easier to learn than Arabic which is probably true. I'm hoping that within another year or two I will be able to work seriously with Persian texts, which is really important for the later material covered in the last big section of HoPWaG episodes on the Islamic world. In fact, I think that if I had not tackled all that material in the podcast I would never have gotten around to trying to do this.

I should probably also learn Hebrew but you know, one thing at a time.