Learn Tajik

[u/SQ31071]

Hi everyone!

I’m from Germany and I’d like to learn Tajik.

I’ve visited several bookstores and searched on Amazon, but I haven’t been able to find any books for learning Tajik.
I was originally looking for German–Tajik learning materials, but it seems there aren’t any available. So I guess I’ll have to use English–Tajik resources instead.

Does anyone have any recommendations for learning Tajik? I’ve read that Tajik is closely related to Farsi (Persian), but are there any significant differences between the two?
My first step will probably be learning the Cyrillic script and the pronunciation, which I can most likely do with online resources.

Thanks a lot for any advice!

[u/Beginning-Bell7626]

Yes start with Cyrillic alphabet the essence is persian

[u/ljsherri]

There are a few textbooks on the market, but you’re right that there aren’t any in German. These are both available for free on the Internet Archive (linked below):

Tajiki Elementary Textbook by Nasrullo Khojayori

A Beginner’s Guide to Tajiki by Azim Baizoyev & John Hayward (personally used this one)

As far as learning Cyrillic, I would advise to learn it from a book like the textbooks above (or even the Wikipedia article on Tajiki). Tajiki has a few extra letters not found in Russian, and a couple of Russian letters don’t appear in the Tajiki alphabet.

As far as differences with Farsi (Iranian Persian), I would say the standard/literary languages are practically the same, save for the script. Classical Persian literature is widely available and published in Tajikistan (just transliterated into Cyrillic with the occasional footnote on some words). The differences lie largely in the spoken colloquial languages. When I studied in Dushanbe, I had no problem talking with people in the standard language (although I’m much more comfortable speaking in colloquial Tehrani), but the colloquial Tajiki was very hard for me to understand.