PersiandDee is designed for people who want to teach themselves Persian and are already motivated enough to be able to follow this kind of medium. PersianDee does not believe that talking about apples and bananas (along with a long list of tropical fruits and African animals) is always the best way to start learning a language, compared with talking about cities, houses, mobile phones and people. Nor does it believe that for all language learners being able to handle conversations in cafés and restaurants is necessarily a better initial step than getting familiar with the past simple tense.

Different languages are learned for different purposes. PersianDee acknowledges that Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan do not attract millions of foreign tourists annually. It also acknowledges the fact that for people who start learning Persian, this is probably not the first experience in learning a foreign language. For these reasons, while trying to keep the whole experience fun, PersianDee has chosen to be a bit old-fashioned compared to other language learning websites, putting more weight on boring stuff like "word stress" and "the subjunctive mood" while paying less attention to elephants and zebras.

I started writing the content for this website in 2005, when I was sixteen. I was teaching myself French at the time and was impressed to see how effectively the web can help me learn a new language. My main source was LanguageGuide.org, and I still admire that website greatly for its simplicity and usefulness.

For seven years building this website was my main hobby. This experience taught me a lot about English (which is a second langauge for me), syntax, and web design skills. After I became a student in Computer Engineering in Sharif University of Technology in Tehran and when later during my undergraduate years I decided to switch to Linguistics for Ph.D, I learned lots of other stuff which helped me further in building this website. I must admit, however, that the content was almost ready since 2011 and for two years I was busy developing the actual website with as slow a pace as you can imagine. Today, I'm not proud of all of the material in this website. To be honest, even looking at the writing style of my 20-year-old self bothers me. But I don't think I'll ever come back to this project to make substantial improvements. I got my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Arizona in 2019 and currently live in Berkeley, CA. I do research on phonology and its interface with literature (poetic meter, rhyme, poetic language, etc.)

The idea of helping people learn Persian still makes me excited. I'll be happy to help you, and your emails are more than welcome. Feel free to contact me about the Persian language, the website itself or anything else that you find relevant.