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Modern Persian: Spoken and Written, Volume 1 (Yale Language) ReviewI wrote a rather lengthy review of the first part of this book in September 2007. It is now November 2007 and I can write a shorter review: DON'T BUY THIS BOOK. INSTRUCTORS: Read this book thoroughly before you adopt it. If you still want to use it for your class, you had better be ready to work very hard to overcome its tremendous weaknesses. The earlier review that I wrote follows. If I were to update that review now, it would probably be longer than Amazon would allow and more negative than anyone would want to read. I blame the authors less than I blame Yale University Press. Is there no editor there who has some sense of what a language text should be like these days? It's a shame because this could be an outstanding book for someone who wants to learn major aspects of the language, especially the spoken language, and the culture. But the authors must take it beyond somebody's lecture notes. Apparently no one at Yale University Press knows how to help them do that.
Every book has merit. Especially one published by the Yale University Press and whose authors include one from Princeton University, one from the University of Arizona and the other from Max Planck Institute. Right? So I thought, but, for me, this book has shaken, though not yet destroyed, that belief. The most serious and obvious shortcoming of this book is that there is only one CD, for the two-volume set of books. On p. xvii of the Introduction the authors say they "emphasize learning by ear from the very first lesson". These days that ought to mean copious materials on numerous CDs. (Compare Jain's single volume, Introduction to Hindi Grammar with 9 CDs. For Arabic, compare Brusted et al. Alif Baa and Al-Kitaab with several beautifully made DVDs.) Not only is there relatively little on the CDs, but what I've heard so far isn't done thoughtfully. The very first track is 20 seconds long. Fully 10 of those seconds are taken up by an American (a secretary? a graduate student? a work-study student? certainly not a professional voice actress) who announces "Modern Persian Spoken and Written" (no surprise given that the CD came with the book of the same name), "Volume 1, lesson 1, 1.4 Dialogue 1". My most enduring memory of that track is the number of times she says the number 1 in an American accent. I was expecting to hear Farsi. It would have been better even had someone with a heavy Iranian accent introduced the track in English. On the third track you can hear somebody turning pages in the background; the Dialogue is only 7 lines long so no one needed to be turning pages to make sure they were reading their part correctly. The page-turning during the recording strikes me as thoughtless and yes, even a little lazy and ill-prepared.
There are things I like about the book, e.g. its plainness. Too many modern texts, langauge and otherwise (e.g for Italian, Lazzarino et al. ) have margins decorated with colored pictures, additional material, a dozen other words not included in the regular vocabulary, et c. It makes for a captivating collage but I find it detracts from focussing on the material. On the other hand, Modern Persian is pretty much plain text and I like that. However the entire text is double-spaced, so I feel I'm spending a lot of time flipping back through pages when I want to refer back to previous material. Single-spacing could reduce that.
In their favor the authors say that they have designed the book for extensive classroom interaction, and that they have done. There are indeed numerous exercises, substitution drills included. It would not detract from those to put them on CDs also.
In the Introduction they offer a notation for indicating word stress, intonation and sentence stress. Alright, that can somewhat make up for the lack of CDs. Sadly here again, their efforts are marked by what seems to me to be thoughtlessness and inconsistency. On p. xxx, they say that "In the first two lessons, the contours of sentence intonation are marked by lines that run below, through and above the sentence". That simply isn't true. In the first lesson I found that they use the stated notation on only 6 occasions in a chapter with dozens of sentences. In lesson Two, by my count, the number of times they use the stated notation drops precipitously to 0. To be fair to them, they say on p. xxx, that "Intonation contours will not be indicated everywhere ...". Alright, but on p. 12, they begin using a completely different, completely unexplained notation consisting of forward and backward slashes and underlining. So what does the underlining mean? Back to p. xxx where we're told occasionally boldface will be substituted for underlining. They say also that "after the first two lessons, we have used the italic, bold or underline to mark the one syllable receiving the principal stress in a sentence". Actually they don't wait for after the first two lessons; to indicate stress, they seem to use underlining also in the first two lessons, as well as the 6 instances of the originally stated notation, as well as the unexplained notation. Then they use underlining for other things. For example: On p. 12 in the unexplained notation for intonation, every syllable is underlined, everything is underlined including the forward and backward slashes, the only exceptions being the period and the final forward slash. On p. 20, in Drill 8, underlining is used for the words to be substituted for and we're supposed to refer back to Drill 3 to see what intonation to use and that Drill shows that the sentence stress falls on the '-ran' (underlined) of 'tehran' while back to Drill 8, the entire word 'tehran' is underlined because it's to be substituted for. On p. 21, §1.8 this appears: "khub-e"; it's a short sentence, both syllables are underlined and that means what???!!! as far as sentence stress is concerned? Because elsewhere you can find "khub-e". Alright, this is the eleventh language I've studied and in general I'm an experienced learner, so I can flip back and forth and figure out what the authors intended... ,eventually ... ,maybe. But why should I have to? A text is supposed to minimize those kinds of obstacles for the reader, so the learner can focus on the language. And the obstacle here is perfectly and easily avoidable: use a single notation for indicating the one syllable in a sentence that is to receive the main stress, e.g. use italics and then don't use italics for anything else. The authors wouldn't need to go through the effort and expense of making lots of CDs to do that. It would require only a clear-headed decision and then to follow through thoughtfully on that. Alright the authors are academics and maybe their book has evolved over the years from class notes that date to a pre-computer-no-CD era; it shows all the signs of that. But if a publisher, like Yale University Press, is going to publish a language book these days and charge about $80 for it, there ought to be editors, colleagues or at least a graduate student, who can straighten out the authors' inconsistencies of notation.
One last thing, and here maybe I'm mistaken because I'm just starting out in Persian, and maybe there are variants of words that I am not yet aware of. But by my reading, the very first word that they offer in a meaningful way (p. 8 Cultural Materials: Greetings), and not just practice in pronunciation, don't worry about the meaning, is the word 'tekrar'. At least it appears that way everywhere else that I see it. But on p. 8, it appears thus: 'tekar'. Is that an acceptable variant of 'tekrar'? Is it just me? Or is that a significant typo in the first meaningful Persian word of the book? Alright, every book has typos. But in light of everything else I've said above, I think it is emblematic of a none-to-polished effort, to judge by the first two chapters at least. (By the way, 'tekrar' means 'repeat' which, in my view of things, is not a Greeting, but rather an expression useful in the classroom.)
I'll continue because I want to learn some Persian, because I've got to believe in the reputation of Yale University Press and in the reputations of the institutions where the authors work and because I want to believe that eventually the authors' obviously good intentions will deliver the goods later on in the book. But dear authors put yourself, thoughtfully and consistently, in the place of those who want to learn some Persian but don't already know any. The people you recognize in the Acknowledgements have let you down and not told you some obvious truths about your book, the most important of which is: YOU CAN DO A MUCH, MUCH BETTER JOB.
Modern Persian: Spoken and Written, Volume 1 (Yale Language) OverviewAlthough Persian is one of the world's oldest languages, in its modern form it is still spoken by more than forty million people in Iran and by more than twenty million people elsewhere. These volumes provide students from beginning to intermediate levels with a mastery of modern Persian (also known as farsi) and with an understanding of colloquial Persian.The books offer extended vocabulary, grammar, and essays on aspects of Iranian culture. Volume I emphasizes speaking and understanding, and Volume 2 focuses on the written language. The first to teach Persian as a living language, Modern Persian incorporates the most effective methodologies and the most recent cultural and linguistic changes occurring in Iran.
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