🇮🇷 Best Persian media for advanced learners

One of the biggest Persian-language news operations outside Iran, publishing text articles, video reports and programmes every day, all free and all in standard written Persian. As a graduation target it is ideal: the same story is often available as text and as video, so you can read first and then listen. Nothing is graded or slowed for learners, the register is formal, and the political framing is contested inside Iran — worth knowing, though it does not affect its value as language input.

Hafez, Rumi, Ferdowsi, Saadi, Khayyam and hundreds of lesser-known poets, digitised in full and free, with recitations attached to many poems and links between related verses. Persian literary culture runs through poetry to a degree that surprises learners, and this is where Iranians themselves look a line up. It is classical language, so it will not teach you to order lunch, and there are no translations or learner notes — bring an advanced reading level or a teacher.

Thousands of public-domain books recorded by volunteers, downloadable as MP3 or M4B with no account. Pairing a LibriVox recording with the matching free Project Gutenberg text gives you a full audiobook-plus-ebook study set for nothing. Two caveats: recordings are volunteer-quality and vary a lot reader to reader, and everything is out of copyright, so the language is often a century old — great for literature, poor for modern slang.

The Persian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, publishing news audio, podcasts and matching text throughout the day — the audio-first counterpart to reading BBC Persian. Free and easy to work through in short bursts. It is a US-funded outlet and is blocked inside Iran, so its framing is not neutral and Iranian friends may react to it; as with any news source, use it for language and get your perspective from more than one place.

A franchise of local producers filming unscripted street interviews, each episode subtitled in the target language and English, which is the closest free thing to hearing how people genuinely speak. All YouTube episodes are free; membership adds transcripts, vocabulary lists and exercises. Real-speed unscripted speech is hard early on — start with the slower 'Super Easy' episodes if you are below B1.

A streaming service where every show has clickable dual subtitles and saved words become flashcards, covering 15 languages with apps on phone, Roku and TV. It solves the 'what do I watch' problem for languages where Netflix's catalogue is thin. The library is much smaller than a mainstream streamer and it is subscription-only — if you already pay for Netflix, Language Reactor's free tier does most of the same job.