Persian Phrasebook

By the Heritage Persia guiding team, Shiraz·Published 12 September 2026·Last reviewed 12 September 2026·Sixty-eight phrases, four sounds, and the ones that are traps

English is widely spoken by younger Iranians in the cities and almost not at all outside them. That gap is where a phrasebook earns its keep — not at the hotel desk in Isfahan, where somebody speaks English, but at a village bakery, in a shared taxi, at a bus counter in a town nobody writes guides about.

What follows is organised by how much work each phrase does rather than by grammatical category. It starts with the four sounds that make the difference between being understood and not, then twelve phrases that carry an entire week, then the specialised lists. The section on taarof phrases is the one we would read twice, because those are the ones that mean the opposite of what they appear to mean.

Four Sounds, and One Rule

Persian is easier to pronounce than it looks. There are no tones, no gendered nouns, no case endings, and the verb comes at the end and can often be dropped entirely. Four sounds do not exist in English, and getting them approximately right is most of the battle.

Everything else maps onto English closely enough. zh is the s in measure, ch and sh are as in English, and there is no th or w sound in Persian at all.

The Twelve That Carry a Week

If you learn nothing else, learn these. They are ordered by how often you will actually use them, which is not the order any textbook puts them in.

Note what is missing. How are you is not in the twelve, because the answer will be a paragraph and you will not follow it. Greet, thank, ask, and let the conversation find its own level.

The Phrases That Are Traps

This is the section that is worth actual money. Taarof is a system of ritual courtesy in which the first offer is made to be declined and the first refusal is made to be overcome, and it has a fixed vocabulary. Heard literally, several of these phrases mean something they do not mean.

The mechanics are the same every time: an offer is repeated, a refusal is repeated, and the true position emerges on the third exchange. A visitor who accepts the first offer has taken something that was not really given; one who accepts the first refusal has not insisted warmly enough.

Persian Numerals, and Reading a Price

Twenty minutes on the flight, and it pays for itself the first time you are in a bazaar where the price tags are in nothing else. The numerals are not the same as the Arabic ones you may half-know — four, five and six differ.

Numerals read left to right, exactly like ours, even though the words around them run right to left. ۱۲۵ is one hundred and twenty-five.

The words for the round numbers: dah ten, bist twenty, si thirty, chehel forty, panjāh fifty, shast sixty, haftād seventy, hashtād eighty, navad ninety, sad a hundred, hezār a thousand, milyun a million.

Greetings and Courtesy

Persian has a genuine formal register and it is not optional politeness. shomā for you, and the plural verb ending, is what you use with every adult stranger; to is for children, close friends and family. Using shomā everywhere is never wrong.

Eating

Getting Around

In the Bazaar

If Something Goes Wrong

Four Things Worth Knowing Before You Open Your Mouth

Persian is not Arabic. The script is shared, with four extra letters, and a good deal of vocabulary is borrowed — but the languages are unrelated, Persian being Indo-European. Arabic greetings land as foreign, and assuming Iranians are Arabs is the one cultural error that genuinely irritates.

Farsi and Persian are the same language. Fārsi is simply the Persian word for it. Either is correct in English; Persian is the older and more usual name, and nobody will correct you for using the other.

Do not use to with a stranger. It is the informal you, and with an adult you have just met it reads the way calling a stranger by a nickname would. shomā is never wrong.

Your accent is not a problem. Foreign visitors attempting Persian are received with a warmth that is disproportionate to the effort. Nobody is grading you, three words are treated as an achievement, and the phrase that gets the largest response for the least work is khaste nabāshid.

How to Actually Get These Into Your Head

Twelve phrases, not sixty-eight. Learn the first table on the flight, use them for two days, and add from the situational tables as you need them. A phrasebook read cover to cover is forgotten by Isfahan; twelve phrases used forty times each are permanent by day three.

Write the numerals on a card and keep it with your cash. That single card does more work than the rest of this page combined, because it converts every price tag in every bazaar from a picture into a number.

Download an offline dictionary before you fly rather than relying on live translation — much of the internet is filtered and connectivity outside the cities is patchy, which the connectivity guide covers. And remember that for the whole classic route you will have a guide who speaks both languages; these phrases are for the hours you are on your own, which are the hours worth having.