Read Beginner Persian Stories with Live AI Translations

Quick facts about Persian

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

Sources

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

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 writing system does Persian use?

Persian alphabet of 32 letters: the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet plus پ, چ, ژ and گ, written right to left; short vowels are usually not written. Tajik is written in Cyrillic.

Is Stichos suitable for complete beginners with zero prior knowledge (A0)?

Yes. A0 is a primary focus, designed for readers with no prior knowledge. A1 then adds basic everyday vocabulary and simple connected clauses as your foundation grows.

Are Stichos levels the same as CEFR levels?

Not exactly. Stichos levels use the familiar CEFR names, from A0 to B2, and are modelled on the CEFR (the Common European Framework of Reference), so a Stichos B1 is meant to feel close to a B1 in your course book. They aren't an official CEFR rating, and different books and exams draw the lines in slightly different places. A0 is Stichos's own addition, just below the framework's first level.

Are the stories written by AI, and how accurate are they?

Yes. Stories are generated by AI and then checked by further automated steps against the grammar and vocabulary rules for your level. That catches most problems, but it isn't a human editor, so an occasional unnatural phrase or slip can get through. Treat Stichos as practice material, and check anything you're unsure of with a teacher or a reference.

Can I read stories with explanations in my native language?

Yes. Stichos allows you to pair any target language with any native support language. You can read a Croatian story with French glosses, or a German story with Spanish explanations.

How does word lookup work while reading?

Tap or click any word for its meaning in that sentence, explained in your own language. In the full version, you can save any word to your Vocab Bank for later review.

Is the preview free, and what happens to my email?

Yes. The preview is free and needs no account. If you join the Reading List, we use your email to send your 3 free sample stories (PDF, after you confirm your address) and to let you know when we fully open. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle it.

Do stories include audio or narration?

Story narration isn't part of the preview. At launch, the Premium Audio add-on reads every story aloud in a natural-sounding AI voice, in 39 of our 40 languages (Esperanto doesn't have audio support yet).