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Learning Persian with Anki, ChatGPT and YouTube

I’ve been learning Persian (Farsi) for a while now, and I’m using a bunch of tools for it. The central one is certainly Anki, a spaced repetition app to train memory. I’m creating my own never-ending deck of cards, with different types of content, for different purposes. The most frequent type of cards is grammar focused phrases (very rarely single words) coming sometimes from my own daily life, but also very often directly from videos of the Persian Learning YouTube channel, created by Majid, a very talented and nice Persian teacher, in my opinion.

I use this type of card to exercise my reading, which is very difficult and remains stubbornly slow, even though I know the 32 letters of the Persian alphabet quite well by now. But the different ways of writing them (which varies by their position in the word) and the fact that the vowels are not present makes it an enduringly challenging task. I listen at 75% speed I use the “dual subtitles” browser extension to have both the Farsi and English subtitles at the same time (I set the Farsi one slightly bigger) Every time a new sentence appears, I read it very quickly first in English (I pause if I need to), and then I listen carefully to the voice, to let the meaning and sound of Farsi infuse my mind (this part is very subtle but the most important: you must “feel” that you understand, and this feeling must cover even the words that you don’t know; because the meaning of the sentence is currently present and active in your mind, because you just read the English part, I believe that its mapping with the Farsi words that you then hear is particularly efficient, at least that’s my theory) I also read the Farsi script, to improve my understanding, and disambiguate certain words for which it’s hard for me to hear what is exactly said I repeat out loud what has been said also, which is quite important Most importantly: I repeat this process (for a single video) over and over, in order to reach a stage where I genuinely understand what is said, in real-time, which is a very powerful and exhilarating feeling.

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