I’ve been learning Persian (Farsi) for a while now, and I’m using a bunch of tools for it. The central one is certainly Anki, a spaced repetition app to train memory. I’m creating my own never-ending deck of cards, with different types of content, for different purposes. The most frequent type of cards is grammar focused phrases (very rarely single words) coming sometimes from my own daily life, but also very often directly from videos of the Persian Learning YouTube channel, created by Majid, a very talented and nice Persian teacher, in my opinion.

Let’s take an example, suppose there is this slide in one of Majid’s videos:

From this, I will extract three screenshots (with the MacOS screenshot tool). First, to create a card of type “basic” (one side). I use this type of card to exercise my reading, which is very difficult and remains stubbornly slow, even though I know the 32 letters of the Persian alphabet quite well by now. But the different ways of writing them (which varies by their position in the word) and the fact that the vowels are not present makes it an enduringly challenging task.

The next type of card I create with the two remaining screenshots is “basic and reversed”, which actually creates two cards (one for each direction), one with some romanized phrase, and the other with the English or French translation:

When I review these cards in my daily Anki routine, this is where ChatGPT enters into play. First I have set a “Persian” project with these instructions:

With this project, every time I have a doubt or don’t remember something in Anki, I just take a screenshot and paste it in the project:

With this, I have an instant refresher on any notion, in any context. Sometimes I need to do this over and over, before it gels into a deeper, more instant and visceral “knowledge”.

The next set of techniques is also based on YouTube. I use a Chrome extension called Dual Subtitles (which only works of course with videos having actual dual sources of subtitles):

The dual subtitles serve a couple of purposes: first as a source of new Anki cards (I create the cards directly, again with screenshots in the clipboard).

I also use the Tweaks for YouTube extension, which allows me to get extra keyboard shortcuts, to go back and forward only 1 second, instead of the built-in 5 seconds.

With these YouTube extensions, I have developed this particular “technique” to improve my vocal understanding:

  1. I listen at 75% speed
  2. I use the “dual subtitles” browser extension to have both the Farsi and English subtitles at the same time (I set the Farsi one slightly bigger)
  3. Every time a new sentence appears, I read it very quickly first in English (I pause if I need to), and then I listen carefully to the voice, to let the meaning and sound of Farsi infuse my mind (this part is very subtle but the most important: you must “feel” that you understand, and this feeling must cover even the words that you don’t know; because the meaning of the sentence is currently present and active in your mind, because you just read the English part, I believe that its mapping with the Farsi words that you then hear is particularly efficient, at least that’s my theory)
  4. I also read the Farsi script, to improve my understanding, and disambiguate certain words for which it’s hard for me to hear what is exactly said
  5. I repeat out loud what has been said also, which is quite important
  6. Most importantly: I repeat this process (for a single video) over and over, in order to reach a stage where I genuinely understand what is said, in real-time, which is a very powerful and exhilarating feeling.