I like your reasons for wanting to learn Persian! Not sure how long they can keep you motivated, though. But just so you know, there are far more Iranian students in the US, than there are in Russia. About the difficulties, you probably know that English and Persian are both Indo-European languages, so they share more similarities than do say, English and Russian. I know Persian probably looks alien to you now, and "like it's written by an inchworm on absinthe scrawling all over the page" as one American describes it here (I recommend you listen to the whole story, by the way!): http://www.podcasts.com/npr_snap_judgment_podcast/episode/snap_judgment_extra_102x_iranian_cafe But, in fact, it would make much more sense if it was written with the Latin alphabet, rather than the Arabic alphabet. Being a phonetic language (similar to Spanish), learning the orthography would be a breeze then, while with it is close to a nightmare now. (It's not that bad actually, and I guess you'll find it cool once you're able to read it.) Now, if it wasn't for all the cognates English shares with the Romance languages, I'd even say Persian was an easier language for an English speaker to learn. The only other hurdle I can think of is the gap between formal and colloquial Persian, which seems to me to be much larger than in case of say English. And, without that many resources available, it is quite difficult to achieve fluency. Regarding the benefits, well, it's not exactly the most "useful" language. It can be a very charming, though. Chances are you might even fall in love with it, and eventually want to travel to Iran and get to meet some of those crazy people!

Here are some of my favorite resources that are available online for free: A great course from University of Texas, bundled with multimedia: http://www.laits.utexas.edu/persian_teaching_resources/ I also like the lessons on this website, a lot: http://www.persiandee.com/ A verb conjugator, plus some very good material on grammar and vocabulary: http://www.jahanshiri.ir/pvc/en/ A good resource for pronunciation: http://forvo.com/languages/fa/ A bilingual dictionary that comes with IPA: http://www.vajje.com/ I suggest you start with this material, and once you found out that you are indeed interested in the language (hopefully), you can get some tutoring here on Italki. Good luck!

Hi Erin. Check these discussions, I hope they help : http://www.italki.com/discussion/100696 http://www.italki.com/discussion/74800

Two of the users of this site suggested these websites, you can check them to see if you like them or not: http://www.persiandee.com/ Persian self-study software: http://scict.ir/portal/Home/Default.aspx?CategoryID=c42c4f00-701d-4cff-9388-757b97f03c7c

Dear I, m a bilingual. Teacher from Iran and now I, m working on italki. Com I have got a lot of golden experiences. in teaching those both languages. I have a university degree in. English and persian literature so please go ahead there if you would you like.