Persian Reading Materials Designed for Your Students

Key Facts About the Persian Language

Speakers

About 91 million people speak Persian as a first language and about 35 million more as a second language (2020–2024 estimates), across the Iranian (Farsi), Afghan (Dari) and Tajik varieties.¹

Did you know?

Persian has no grammatical gender: nouns are not masculine or feminine, and the third-person pronoun does not distinguish "he" from "she".¹

The main challenge

Short vowels are normally left unwritten, so beginners have to learn how a word sounds rather than read it off the page. Formal written Persian also differs noticeably from the colloquial Persian spoken in Tehran.¹

CEFR exams

• AMFA Persian Proficiency Test (Saadi Foundation for the general version; academic version by Iran's National Organization of Educational Testing): not CEFR-aligned

Where students struggle

• The ezafe, an unstressed -e (-ye after vowels) that links a noun to what describes or owns it, as in برادرِ مریم (barādar-e Maryam, Maryam's brother). It is pronounced but generally not written, so learners miss it when reading.²

Teaching notes

• In beginner texts, show the ezafe with the short-vowel mark, as in برادرِ مریم; ordinary Persian spelling leaves it out.²

Sources

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_language
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezafe

About the Persian language

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_language
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_alphabet
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_grammar

Persian reading proficiency benchmarks (CEFR)

Stichos levels are modelled on the CEFR. Iran’s AMFA Persian proficiency test, whose general version is run by the Saadi Foundation, does not publish a CEFR mapping that we could verify, so this column gives CEFR labels only. It is a reading guide, not an exam result.

Reference corpora

Two widely cited tagged corpora of written Persian are linked to the University of Tehran linguist Mahmood Bijankhan.¹

• Bijankhan Corpus: About 2.6 million words of news and general text, manually tagged for part of speech with a set of 550 tags and sorted into some 4,300 subject categories, created by the University of Tehran’s Database Research Group.¹
• Peykare: Bijankhan, Sheykhzadegan, Bahrani and Ghayoomi (Language Resources and Evaluation, 2011) describe a written corpus of contemporary Persian organised into five language varieties and 24 registers, with special attention to the ezafe and to homographs.²
• Register: Stichos writes standard written Persian at every level and avoids spoken contractions, writing است rather than ـه and می‌رود rather than میره.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijankhan_Corpus
2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220147881_Lessons_from_building_a_Persian_written_corpus_Peykare

Readability design principles

Persian readability has one long-standing formula and some newer machine-learning work.^1,2

• Flesch–Dayani: Dayani (2000) adapted Flesch Reading Ease to Persian by raising its constant from 206.835 to 262.835; the score falls as words get longer in letters and sentences get longer in words. A 2018 study used it to rate Iranian patient package inserts.¹
• Machine learning: Mohammadi and Khasteh (2018) built what they describe as the first Persian readability dataset, crowdsourced, and trained a machine-learning model on it.²
• Stichos: Stichos controls difficulty with grammar rules and sentence-length limits for each level. At A0 a sentence is one SOV main clause; at A1 clauses may be joined only with و (“and”).

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5863713
2. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.06639

Script & grammar scaffolding

• Tenses and moods: A0 uses the present (می‌خورد) with است and دارد. A1 adds the simple past (گذشته ساده). A2 opens the past continuous (گذشته استمراری), the present subjunctive (حال التزامی) after modals such as باید, and the future (خواهد رفت). The past perfect (گذشته دور) arrives at B1, and the past subjunctive and the passive at B2.
• The object marker: را follows every specific direct object, and pronoun clitics attach to nouns, prepositions or verbs in standard written spelling.
• Address: Readers use شما with strangers, adults and in formal settings, and keep تو for close friends, family and children. Subject pronouns are usually dropped, since the verb ending shows the person.
• Vowel marks: Persian is normally written without short-vowel marks, and unlike its Arabic readers, Stichos does not require them in Persian text.

Related academic & framework resources

• AMFA (Persian Proficiency Test) – Saadi Foundation: The Saadi Foundation’s description of AMFA’s academic and general versions, which test all four skills.
• Calculating reading ease score of patient package inserts in Iran: Zarea Gavgani and colleagues (2018), which sets out the Flesch–Dayani formula and applies it to medical leaflets.
• A Machine Learning Approach to Persian Text Readability Assessment Using a Crowdsourced Dataset: The paper by Hamid Mohammadi and Seyed Hossein Khasteh.
• Bijankhan Corpus: An overview of the tagged corpus from the University of Tehran’s Database Research Group.
• Lessons from building a Persian written corpus: Peykare: The 2011 paper describing the Peykare corpus.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is included in the free preview today?

You can try an A0 or A1 story generated live on this page, complete with tap-to-translate vocabulary and line-by-line translations in your students' own language. You can also join the Reading List to receive 3 free sample stories as a downloadable PDF.

Which levels will Educator Studio cover when it launches?

At launch, Educator Studio will cover every level from A0 through B2, allowing you to generate texts for absolute beginners up to upper-intermediate learners.

How do I share reading passages with my students?

At launch, you can share any story you generate by sending a link directly to your students. There will be no limit on how many share links you can create.

Do my students need to create an account to read shared texts?

No, your students can open any shared link in their web browser without an account. They are invited, but never forced, to register a free account if they want to save their stories and vocabulary lists.

How does audio pronunciation work for Persian stories?

At launch, students can tap any word in a shared story to hear it read by a standard computer voice. If you choose the Premium Audio add-on, you gain access to natural-sounding voices, full story narration with distinct speakers for dialogues, and MP3 audio exports that you or your students can download.

How does the system handle Persian orthography and grammar features like the ezafe?

Because unwritten short vowels and unwritten ezafe links complicate reading for beginners, our stories are generated by AI and automatically checked against level-appropriate grammar rules. This includes showing vowel marks and ezafe links for lower levels. The check is automated rather than a human reviewer, so an occasional error can occur, and we recommend checking every text before sending it to a class.

Can I edit a generated story or limit the grammar tenses used?

Yes. At launch, you can adjust any sentence or translation before sending a link. You will also be able to turn specific tenses on or off, ensuring the passage remains within the structures you have already taught.