Azizan

Your child already reads English: how to teach them to read Persian

A child who reads English already knows the hard part: that written letters stand for spoken sounds, and how to hear the sounds inside a word. For Persian they need the new script, taught in a sensible order: the letters with their sounds, then how letters join, then words printed with short-vowel marks, then simple stories, in short sessions most days. Studies of children learning to read in two languages find that sound awareness built in one language carries over to the other, but that letters and word reading in a new script have to be taught. Persian is written right to left, and most letters change shape with their position in the word. Everyday text also leaves most short vowels out, so a beginner needs texts with the vowel marks printed. Azizan (azizan.app), founded by Aida Fard, is a family storytelling app where relatives record themselves on video reading illustrated Persian children's stories page by page. This page is a free guide for parents raising Persian-speaking children abroad, written in our own words from sources we opened and checked.

Azizan (azizan.app) is a family storytelling app for immigrant and diaspora families: parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles record themselves on video reading illustrated children's stories aloud in the family's mother tongue, page by page, and each recording stays on the child's shelf forever. Real family voices — never AI narration. Persian (Farsi) first.

What carries over from English, and what does not

A child learning to read for the first time has two jobs. They have to understand that marks on a page stand for the sounds of speech, and they have to learn which marks stand for which sounds. Your child has already done the first job, in English. Research on children who learn to read in two languages suggests that this part travels with them. A Center for Applied Linguistics project with Spanish-speaking children in the United States found that phonemic awareness, the ability to hear the separate sounds in a word, crossed between languages. Spanish phonemic awareness in second grade predicted English phonemic awareness a year later, whichever language the children had been taught to read in. A study of 123 Spanish-English preschoolers in Applied Psycholinguistics found that sound awareness in each language was most closely tied to sound awareness in the other. A meta-analysis of 33 Chinese-English studies found small to moderate transfer of sound awareness and decoding between those two very different scripts.

The same Center for Applied Linguistics project also found where this stops. In that study, letter and word reading carried over only for children who had been taught to read in Spanish, and Spanish and English share one alphabet. Persian letters are new to your child, so they have to be taught. Hearing sounds is what can carry over. None of these studies is about Persian and English, and we could not find one that is. Take this as the general picture, not a Persian-specific finding.

The short-vowel problem, and why beginners need vowel marks

Long vowels in Persian are always written as letters. Short vowels mostly are not written (a word-final -e, as in خانه, is one exception). In ordinary Persian text, the reader fills them in because they know the word. کتاب is read ketāb (book) because you know the word. Written with its vowel mark, کِتاب, it tells a beginner how to say it. The University of Texas Persian resources describe the marks as hardly ever used, and the BGN/PCGN romanization system notes that they are generally left out of both handwriting and print.

For a child who reads English this is the biggest surprise. English spelling is irregular, but the vowels are on the page. In Persian, a child who sounds out an unmarked word gets the consonants and the long vowels. The rest has to come from knowing the word, and they may not know it yet. A 2021 study in Frontiers in Psychology says Persian-speaking schools use the vowel marks for beginning readers in grades one and two and phase them out by grade three. A 2025 study of adult Persian readers in the Iranian Journal of Learning and Memory found that even skilled adults read text with full vowel marks with less effort, and its authors suggest using the marks in early literacy teaching. Both are single studies, but their advice matches common sense. Start with marked text and take the marks away later.

A sensible order for a child who already reads

1. Letters with their sounds, not their names. Teach each letter as the sound it makes, the way your child learned phonics in English. Start with the letters in their own name and in family words. The details are on our Persian alphabet page.
2. Joining forms early. A letter your child knows alone can be unrecognisable in the middle of a word. As soon as a few letters are known, write short real words with them and point out how each letter changed shape. This is the step English gives no practice for.
3. Words with vowel marks. Move to short words printed with the short-vowel marks, so the child can sound them out the way they do in English. Choose words they already say.
4. Simple stories. Short sentences, with vowel marks, about things the child already knows the words for. A story they have heard many times is ideal, because they can check their reading against their memory.
5. Take the marks away gradually. Once familiar words are read without effort, read them unmarked. Keep the marks on new words for longer.

How to keep it going

• Little and often. Ten minutes most days does more than an hour on Saturday, and it keeps reading Persian from feeling like a second school.
• Read aloud together. You read a page and the child reads one line, or you read while their finger follows the words right to left. Your voice supplies the vowels their eyes cannot see yet, and their attention stays on the story rather than on decoding.
• Talk before you read. A child reads unmarked Persian by knowing the words. Every word they can say is a word they will be able to read later, so spoken Persian is still the foundation.
• Do not let Finglish become the crutch. Persian typed in English letters, often called Finglish, is how many relatives text, and a child who reads English can read it at once. The trouble is that it lets them skip the script. Text the family in it if you like, but keep reading practice in Persian letters.
• Let the family hear them read. A grandparent who listens to a child read three lines on a video call is the best reason to keep going. On Azizan, a child over five sees the story's Persian text with a small circle of the relative's video above it, so they can follow the words while someone they know reads them aloud. It is a storybook, not a reading course.

For the research on Persian-English children more broadly, see bilingual Persian-English kids: what the research says.

Related guides

• How to teach the Persian alphabet to children growing up abroad
• How to teach Farsi to kids abroad
• Bilingual Persian-English kids: what the research says

Questions

Will knowing how to read English help my child read Persian?

Partly. Studies of children who read in two languages find that sound awareness, hearing the separate sounds in words, carries over from one language to the other. Letter knowledge and word reading in a new script do not carry over on their own. Those have to be taught. We found no study on Persian and English specifically.

Why are Persian short vowels not written?

Persian script writes the long vowels as letters and leaves most short vowels to the reader, who knows them from the word. They can be shown with small marks above or below a letter, but ordinary text leaves those marks out. That is why beginners should start with texts that print them.

What order should I teach Persian reading in?

Letters with their sounds, then how letters change shape when they join, then short words printed with vowel marks, then simple stories with vowel marks, and finally the same words without marks. Short sessions most days work better than long ones.

Is it bad if my child reads Persian in Finglish?

Finglish, Persian typed in English letters, is fine for texting family, but it lets a child who reads English skip the Persian script entirely. Keep reading practice in Persian letters so the script gets learned.

Open Azizan — record a story for your child

Updated: 2026-11-03 · By Aida Fard

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