🇮🇷 Best Persian courses for beginners

An old-school free lesson series that starts with the Persian alphabet letter group by letter group and works up through grammar, everyday phrases and poetry, with audio on the lesson pages. There is no registration, no paywall and no upsell — you click lesson one and start, which is exactly why people keep recommending it. The design is dated and most of the site has not changed since the late 2010s, so treat it as a stable free textbook rather than a living course, and get your listening practice elsewhere.

Foreign Service Institute, Peace Corps and DLI materials — full textbooks plus hundreds of hours of audio — are public domain and hosted here for free across dozens of languages. The depth is extraordinary and the FSI Basic courses take diplomats to professional working proficiency, which no consumer app attempts. The recordings are from the 1960s–80s, the drills are relentless, and some vocabulary is dated (Cold War era), so they suit disciplined self-studiers, not casual learners.

Mihalis Eleftheriou records real lessons with a real student and walks you through constructing the language yourself using cognates and logic — Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Swahili are covered. Completely free, no ads, no sign-up, funded by donations. The Spanish course in particular is one of the most recommended free resources anywhere; the trade-off is small vocabulary and no reading or writing practice.

A charity-funded project that sets out to be a complete free aid for anyone learning Persian: sequenced lessons beginning with the alphabet, courses, reading and poetry sections, and a separate strand for pre-schoolers. Everything is free and the site is still alive, with new articles published into 2026. Registration is only needed to track progress. The material is broad rather than deep and the presentation is plain WordPress, so it works best as your free backbone alongside an audio course rather than as your only resource.

Covers 14 languages along an explicit CEFR path, and its best feature is the community exchange: you submit short writing or speaking exercises and real native speakers correct them, free of charge, in exchange for you correcting theirs. The free tier is limited to core lessons; Premium unlocks grammar, offline and the full path. A solid Babbel alternative if you specifically want writing practice with human feedback.

Mark Pentleton teaches a genuine student while you listen in, across French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese, Japanese and Gaelic. The podcast seasons are free on any podcast app and are structured as a real curriculum rather than scattered episodes; the Academy sells premium lesson notes, video and bonus audio. Ideal commuting material for beginners through B1, and the Spanish and French series are the strongest.

Leyla Shams has been teaching spoken Persian here since 2010, and the 230-plus podcast episodes remain free in any podcast app — warm, unhurried lessons built around phrases Iranians actually use, with cultural context woven in. Paid membership (from about $10/month with a 30-day trial) adds the structured Speak, Read/Write and Poetry paths, printable worksheets and live sessions. It is the best single starting point for spoken Farsi, but it is listening-led: the free feed does not teach the script, there is nothing to force you to produce language, and it plateaus around intermediate.

The Innovative Language formula applied to Persian: a short native dialogue, then a line-by-line breakdown, with PDF transcripts, vocabulary lists and flashcards on the paid tiers. A free lifetime account gives real access to the newest lessons, and the absolute-beginner series is a reasonable structured entry point. Two honest caveats: the Persian catalogue is far smaller than the flagship Japanese or Spanish ones and thins out badly above lower-intermediate, and the marketing is relentless, with several confusing tiers and constant discount emails.

The Armenian School of Languages and Cultures runs Persian schools of two to ten weeks with native instructors, covering beginner through upper-intermediate, plus tutoring, excursions and a cohort of fellow students. For most people outside Iran it is the realistic way to get intensive in-person Persian, since studying in Tehran is impractical or unwise for many passports. It is expensive once you add flights and accommodation, the cohort skews academic, and dates are fixed months in advance — plan around a term, not a whim.

Each course is ~100 short bilingual dialogues with native audio: you passively absorb for months, then start an 'active wave' translating back into the target language. Books run around €30 (e-courses ~€50) across 70+ languages, and the method is a long-standing favourite among polyglots for reaching real reading fluency. Caveats: many courses are only published from French, the humour is dated, and it demands daily discipline with no gamification to carry you.

Subscription-only after a handful of free intro lessons, typically $10–15/month with big discounts on annual plans. Lessons are short, dialogue-first and explain grammar properly, which makes it a much more serious beginner course than Duolingo. It covers only 13 languages and effectively stops around B1, so it is a stepping stone rather than a destination.

Over 70 languages, each a step-by-step beginner course written by an experienced teacher, and crucially all the audio is free to download from the companion site even if you find the book secondhand. Slightly more academic and grammar-forward than Teach Yourself, which some learners prefer. Like any book series the individual titles differ in quality; the less common languages are often the only decent course in existence.

You listen to and repeat thousands of native-recorded sentences on a spaced schedule, which builds fluent output patterns without explicit grammar study. It covers 60+ languages and keeps nine minority languages (Catalan, Welsh, Taiwanese, Kurdish and others) permanently free as a preservation effort. It is expensive at roughly $20–40/month, and the repetition is monotonous — most reviewers call it effective but overpriced, so try the 7-day trial first.

Lessons build outward from real conversations with colour-coded literal translations and cultural notes, and the catalogue includes endangered and indigenous languages nobody else covers. Retail pricing starts around $10/month, but a very large number of public libraries and universities give patrons free access — check yours before paying. Content depth per language is modest, so it suits travellers and early learners more than people pushing toward B2.

You sit in on a recorded lesson with two students and build sentences aloud alongside them, with no writing, homework or memorisation; 19 languages are available. It is remarkably good at making the core grammar of Romance languages click in a few hours. Vocabulary coverage is small, the recordings are old, and the courses after Michel Thomas's death are taught by other teachers with mixed results — treat it as a fast on-ramp, not a course of study.

Thirty-minute audio lessons force you to produce sentences out loud before you see anything written, which builds unusually good accent and recall. Subscriptions run about $15–21/month (all-access covers 50+ languages), and older courses are often available through public libraries. It is slow and vocabulary-light by design, so pair it with reading — but for commute or walking time it is the best use of otherwise dead hours.

The 'Complete' books are proper structured courses with dialogues, graded exercises and downloadable audio, and the range covers languages no app touches. Quality varies noticeably by title and author, so check reviews for your specific language before buying rather than trusting the series name. Their graded readers and 'Script Hacking' alphabet guides are also worth knowing about for non-Latin scripts.