Learn Persian / Farsi / Dari with Podcasts

A guide to learning Persian, Farsi, and Dari through podcasts, with recommendations across different difficulty levels and topic areas.

Learning Farsi or Dari from podcasts is a bit easier than with Pashto. There are lots of options in a variety of topic areas, so you’re not confined to listening to news broadcasts 24/7. They also cover a broader spectrum of language abilities, so you have more options even if you’re a relative beginner.

(All of them are available on Overcast and iTunes — just search in the ‘add podcast’ section and you’ll find them using the names/titles given below.)

• BBC Persian Radio — This is a BBC news roundup / discussion programme covering whatever is ‘hot’ on any particular day. It’s released every morning.
• Be Ebarat-e Digar — An interview programme from BBC Farsi. They sometimes have non-Farsi speaking guests on the show but everything is dubbed and exists as a complete Farsi experience. Usually pretty interesting. Heavy on the politics, though.
• Chronos — Also an active YouTube channel. This podcast has a large backlist of short episodes. Well worth a listen. Varied themes and content and less formal language used.
• Danestegi — 50 episodes available as an audio podcast feed and since then more recent episodes are available on a Youtube channel. The show is described as covering everything from science-fiction to climate change to extraterrestrial life to psychic readings to crop circles. Conversational style. Would make a nice break from news reports.
• Farsi Readings in Gronigen — Audio from a Persian literature meetup in the Netherlands. Mostly readings from literature / poetry. Higher-level required but good for exposure.
• Khoresth-e Tech — This is a weekly show produced by SBS Persian covering technology and electronics. If you’re at all interested in those topics, this might be a good place for you to get some exposure to how it’s discussed in Persian.
• Learn Persian with Chai and Conversation — This is a podcast for beginners and low-intermediate. Significant parts of the audio are in English, but it’s sometimes nice when going through a poem and explaining all the various implications of a word.
• Pargar — A weekly roundtable discussion in Farsi from the BBC in which guests discuss big topics of relevance to society at large. A tendency towards politics but also cultural issues are discussed.
• Persian News - NHK World Radio Japan — This is a news broadcast in Farsi with an emphasis on stories that affect East Asia. Released daily and short episodes.
• Persian Night Story — This podcast broadcasts translations of stories into Persian. Sometimes they’re originally written in Farsi but the majority are ‘classics’, so Chekhov / Tolstoy or Roald Dahl or Alice Munro etc.
• Persian Podcast — This podcast is geared towards lower intermediate students of Farsi and the host, Hosein Pouriman, offers interviews and lectures and stories. The material is pretty engaging, though there aren’t too many episodes unfortunately and new episodes are irregularly released.
• Radiography Farsi — A podcast (with a limited number of episodes and no longer broadcasting) in which the host discusses famous photographs from the history of world photography.
• Samaak Audio Mag — This fortnightly podcast offers discussions of literature in Farsi, particularly poetry. Worth subscribing if you’re into Persian literature.
• SBS Dari — A news broadcast in Dari, with an emphasis on stories relating to Afghans in Australia.
• SBS Persian — A news broadcast in Dari, with an emphasis on stories relating to Iranians or Persian-speakers in Australia.
• Shir Khat Persian Blockchain Podcast — This is a podcast in which the host discusses and introduces various aspects of blockchain in Persian. It’s very technical and very in depth (and seems to have been discontinued) but if this is your thing, then there’s lots of material to dig into.