I recently worked on teaching Persian to one of my friends. He is from Bulgaria and I met him last month in Shiraz, Iran. He told me to explain the present tense. I was somehow mixed how to tell him about the present tense in Persian.
My explanations: the present tense in Persian is something irregular which has to be recited. For example the infinitive "رفتن" in present form is "رو" which is pronounced as "/ro/" and the formula to make present tense is this: "می+رو+ َ+پسوند شخص" meaning "mi+ro+a (like in apple) and personal suffix". Although we use "ro" as the present form of "رفتن", this is changed to "رو" pronounced as "/Rav/".
Example: I go
من می روم: "/man mi ravam/"
"Wooow! That's highly complex", he said. "So there is no way to learn it unless you use and conjugate it", I said.
After a month, this week was the first time I could see he is writing the Persian scripts. I was amazed by him, because he told me he was working on scripts and writing.
In fact, the most difficult part of English, if any, for EFL learners may be the past form and past participle of irregular verbs with which I hope someone may agree.
In Persian, the imperatives are also irregular.
On the other hand, the past tense in Persian is really simple. You can omit the "ن" from the infinitive "رفتن" and the past tense is "رفت". then based on this verb "رفت" /raft/, the verb is conjugated.
I want to discuss on this grammar and to see how similar or different may your language be?
When I first heard that Persian verb stems all have two stems (or even more counting the spoken forms of some verbs like گفتن) I was terrified. Luckily, I quickly discovered that most Persian verbs are noun-verb compounds, using a handful of delexicalised verbs like کردن، گرفتن، دادن, etc. and that memorising a small handful of stems can get you a long way.
In case the term "delexicalised verb" is unfamiliar, it's basically a meaningless verb that does nothing except act a noun. For example, گرفتن can have the meaningful, lexical meaning of "get", eg. او کتاب را از دستم گرفت (he got/grabbed the book from my hand), but it's very often delexicalised, for example تصمیم گفتن (to decide, lit. "get a decision"): چرا تصميم گرفتی يه معلم بشی؟ (Why did you decide to become a teacher?), translated word-for-word means *"Why did you get the decision to become a teacher?").
Obviously, here گرفتن (get) is totally meaningless, it has no real use except to complement تصمیم (decision)
English has delexicalised verbs too, used especially in speaking. For example, we can "try" or "have a try", we can "advise" or "give advice", we can "shower" or "take a shower". However it's astonishing just how many Persian verbs are delexicalised.
(Note: this is just my humble opinion as a learner of Persian, if any native Persian-speakers disagree I'm happy to learn from your comments!)
