🇮🇷 The best websites for learning Persian

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.

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.

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.

Built by the University of Texas at Austin as a free supplement for Persian courses, this is the reference you want open in a tab: the writing system explained piece by piece (connecting letters, hamze, madd, tanvin, tashdid), a transcription system, instructions for typing Persian, and grammar entries covering nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs and sentence structure, plus vocabulary with audio and quizzes. Everything is free and needs no account. The interface dates from 2007 and it is a reference rather than a course, so use it to answer questions your main course raises.

A collaborative, Creative Commons-licensed corpus you can search for real usage of a word or download in bulk to build your own decks. It is the raw material behind Clozemaster and countless Anki decks rather than a study tool in itself. Sentences are contributed by volunteers, so quality and naturalness vary — prefer sentences from native contributors and cross-check anything surprising.

Over 100 language editions; the English edition alone has millions of entries covering hundreds of languages, with IPA, declension and conjugation tables, etymologies and usage notes that commercial apps usually paywall. The etymology sections are quietly one of the best vocabulary-retention tools available. Being crowd-sourced, coverage is uneven and rare entries can be wrong — cross-check anything unusual against a native-language dictionary.

Type a word or phrase and it plays back real YouTube clips of people saying it in context, across 25 languages plus sign languages, so you get natural intonation and regional variation rather than an isolated dictionary recording. Free, donation-supported, no account needed. Complements Forvo: Forvo for single words, YouGlish for phrases and prosody.

Elyar, a Tabriz-born teacher based in Milan, has built an unusually well-organised free site around spoken Persian: themed vocabulary guides running to thousands of words, grammar and script explanations, reading practice, and blunt reviews of the other Farsi resources on the market. The reference material is free; one-to-one lessons are the paid side, with a free 25-minute first session. It is one person's opinionated project rather than an institution, and it is newer than the classics, so cross-check anything surprising.

A browser extension plus web reader covering 100+ languages: click a word or drag across a phrase, get an inline translation, and it becomes a flashcard automatically. The free tier gives unlimited single-word translations but caps phrases and AI explanations at 10 a day; Premium is $6/month. Simpler and cheaper than LingQ or Migaku if all you want is frictionless reading of articles and ebooks.

A detailed staged roadmap for acquiring a language through massive comprehensible input — what to do at each stage, when to start output, how to mine sentences — with a free tracker, starter courses and an active Discord. The roadmap and community are free; vocabulary decks, advanced courses and coaching are paid. It is opinionated to the point of dogma about avoiding early output and translation, so take the framework and ignore the purity rules if they do not fit your goals.