Narges Tabrizi

I teach Persian to people who arrive with nothing and to heritage speakers who understand their grandmother but cannot read a street sign. Those are two different courses and I do not run them together.

Beginners start speaking in the first hour, with the alphabet built in over the first six weeks rather than drilled first — it is a shallow orthography and it sticks faster when you already have words to attach it to. From the intermediate level we read: short Forough poems, a Hedayat story, whatever newspaper you actually want to follow.

For anyone who wants it, the last twenty minutes of a lesson can go to calligraphy — Nastaʿlīq with a reed pen, which teaches you more about how the letters join than any grammar table will.