first you should learn alphabet until can read some words and then memorize some primary word and make a sentences with them (with something that you memorize) its not good for you to speak with natives speaking now because you are beginner and you have to study hard until became in a elementary level listen to pronunciation of persion words and the important part is grammar by the way be friend with persion grammar i mean don`t take it hard in my idea first study (i mean self study)and then get a teacher i hope you will be fluent at persion

first you have to learn the Persian alphabet with a few words for example then you need to learn the grammar, it is not very difficult to start,

You can start with Rosetta Stone program. It's really helpful

Hello Scotty. In the end, I guess it depends a bit on what you want to do with the language. If you want to focus on speaking it, then learn how to speak. If you want to write it, learn how to write. (you can guess the rest...) If your main goal is speaking, I would suggest the following: Try to get a book that has both the Persian writing and a transliteration or transcription into the Latin alphabet. It would be best if you have a cd with it so you can listen to the pronunciation (or a native speaker who is willing and ready to read the words to you). Then try to memorize some of the very basic words (in the Latin version), such as "I am", "you are", "We have", "Do you have" - you know, parts of sentences you use every day. Learn the personal pronouns (I you he she it we you they), then learn some major verbs you like and learn how to conjugate them. Then it may be helpful to learn some nouns and adjectives, how to say the numbers, how to ask and answer basic questions. What I just described may take a few months, but you will gain the confidence that you already can say many things that you would need every day. Also, focus on such words that you yourself want to say, this way you keep yourself entertained. I, for one, would find it rather frustrating if I had to memorize words of which I know I am not going to use them anyways. It is absolutely not necessary to learn the alphabet at first, unless you want to focus on reading Persian texts. After all, we did not learn the alphabet of our native language before we learned to speak the language. My experience with Russian was that I found it much easier to read words in Russian that i already knew, for instance if you know that the Russian word for "city" is "gorod", you will recognize it more easily when it is written in Russian. If you don't know the word, it is much easier to misread it, in my example "gopod", or "ropod" or something like that. What difference does it make to you if you don't know the right

first learn persian alphabet. i offer this site http://www.persian-language.org and this http://www.faomer.com/?page_id=74