English Spelling Mistakes Persian (Farsi) Speakers Make, and Why

If Persian is your first language, your English may be strong, careful and wide in vocabulary, and still keep producing the same few errors. You write "vest" when you meant west, or pause over whether it is "adress" or address. Television comes out with a z. A word like student feels as if it ought to start with an e. These slips survive years of study because they are not really about English vocabulary. They come from the way Persian trained your ear and your eye.

That is good news, because habits with a cause can be retrained. This article goes through the places where Persian and English sounds and spelling habits part company, shows the errors each one produces, gives you forty words to practice, and sets out a short daily method. It is written mainly for speakers of Iranian Persian (Farsi), with notes where Dari, the Persian of Afghanistan, is different.

What Persian spelling already taught you

Start with a real advantage. Persian is written in an alphabet that has several letters for the same sound. The s sound can be written ث, س or ص. The z sound has four letters: ذ, ز, ض and ظ. The t sound has two, ت and ط. These letters came into Persian with Arabic words, and in Persian they are pronounced the same, so every Iranian child has to learn which letter belongs in which word. You cannot spell ثانیه (second) or ذرت (corn) just by listening.

English asks exactly the same thing of its writers. The long e sound in sheep, leave, piece and receive is written four different ways, and you have to know the word. Many learners from languages with very regular spelling find this idea painful. You absorbed it in primary school. What you need now is a map of the specific English sounds that Persian did not prepare you to hear, and a plan for the vowels that the Persian script taught you to leave unwritten.

W and V: the most visible trap

Iranian Persian has a v sound, written و, but no separate w sound. A w appears only as part of the diphthong in words like now, and speakers do not feel it as a different consonant. So English w tends to be heard and said as v, and west and vest, wine and vine, wet and vet can sound like the same word.

In writing, this shows up two ways. The direct error writes v for w: "vest" for west, "vill" for will. The overcorrection, by a writer who knows the problem exists, writes w for v: "wery", "wisit", "inwite". Both produce real words or near misses, and a spell-checker often lets them through.

The fix is in the mouth. For v, your top teeth rest lightly on your lower lip. For w, your lips round as if to whistle and your teeth touch nothing. Say the pairs slowly with a finger near your lips and you can feel the difference before you can reliably hear it. If you speak Dari, which has a true w sound, this trap is usually much smaller, and you can skip ahead.

TH, and the letters that lost their sound

Persian has no th sounds. Interestingly, the Arabic letters ث and ذ were once pronounced as the two English th sounds, the one in think and the one in this. In Persian they became s and z. So the Persian habit is built into the alphabet itself: what was once th is now s or z.

Carried into English, this makes think and sink, thin and sin, then and Zen sound close, and some speakers use t and d instead, so three and tree blur. In writing, it causes mainly listening errors: the wrong word when you take notes or write from someone's speech. The spelling of th itself is reliable once you know a word has the sound. English nearly always writes it th.

The vowels the script leaves out

This is the deepest habit, and the one most worth understanding.

Persian writes its long vowels, ā, i and u, with letters. Its three short vowels, a, e and o, are normally not written at all. The word کتاب (ketāb, book) is written with letters for k, t, ā and b; the e is supplied by the reader, who knows the word. Fluent Persian readers do this thousands of times a day without noticing.

English, by contrast, writes every vowel, including the weak ones nobody pronounces clearly. Many unstressed English vowels shrink to a short "uh" sound called the schwa, the sound in the middle of separate, definitely and environment. Persian has no such reduced vowel, because Persian stress falls mostly at the end of the word and the other vowels are still said fully.

Put those two facts together and you get a familiar pattern. Middle vowels go missing or get swapped: "diffrent", "intresting", "seperate", "definately", "enviroment". The ear hears no clear vowel, and the Persian-trained eye is comfortable with a word that does not spell one out.

The best fix is the one native speakers use: find a related word where the vowel is stressed. Definitely contains finite. Separate comes from the same Latin root as prepare, and both have par in the middle. Different comes from differ, and environment contains environ, which is why the n stays. Our article on the schwa gives many more of these.

Six vowels against nearly twenty

Iranian Persian has six vowels, i, e, a (as in cat), u, o and a deep ā. English has around twenty vowel sounds, depending on accent. Some English pairs therefore fall into one Persian slot.

The most common are ship and sheep, live and leave, full and fool. English also has a short "uh" vowel in cup, love and money that Persian lacks, and learners often hear it as the a in cat or the o in cot, so cup and cap, luck and lack get mixed. The good news is that bad and bed are usually easy for Persian speakers, because Persian already separates a and e.

There is no shortcut to twenty vowels. Two things help. Learn the common spellings of each long vowel as a small set, and practice pairs of words that differ by one vowel, listening first and then typing. It feels slow. It retrains the perception the spelling depends on.

The extra e at the start, and the extra vowel inside

Persian does not allow two consonants at the start of a syllable. When words that begin with clusters come into Persian, a vowel is added. Before s plus another consonant, it usually goes at the front: ski is اسکی (eski), stadium is استادیوم (estādyom), and Spain is اسپانیا (Espāniyā). With other clusters, a vowel often goes in the middle: plastic is پلاستیک (pelāstik) and gram is گرم (geram).

In speech this produces "estudent" and "eschool", and occasionally it reaches the page. More often, the effect is quieter. If your inner version of a word has an extra syllable, the spelling you reach for is built on the wrong shape. Say student, street, special and program slowly and deliberately with no vowel before the first consonant, and the spellings settle.

The end of the word is a different story. Persian does allow two consonants at the end of a syllable, as in دوست (dust, friend), so English endings like -st, -nd and -rt are rarely a problem. That is an advantage over learners from many other languages.

French loanwords that look almost English

Persian borrowed a great deal of modern vocabulary through French, and the Persian forms often sit very close to English ones, with French or Persian spellings underneath. آدرس (ādres) came from French adresse, with one d. تلویزیون (televiziyon) has a z sound, matching French and English pronunciation but not English spelling. کلاس (kelās) is class. شکلات (shokolāt) is chocolate. تلفن (telefon) is telephone.

These are the most dangerous words of all, because they feel familiar. The typical errors are "adress", "televizion", "telefon", "clas" and "chocolat". The rule is simple: never trust a borrowed word's Persian or French shape for English spelling. Check the English form separately, and pay attention to double letters and to ph, which English uses for the f sound in many words of Greek origin, such as telephone, photograph and physics.

Double letters deserve their own word. Persian marks a doubled consonant with a small sign called tashdid, and the doubling is pronounced. English doubles are silent, so your ear gives no help with address, committee, accommodation or success. Our guide to doubling in the middle of words explains the patterns behind many of them.

Forty words to practice

These forty words come from the problem areas above. All of them are common in study and work, and several combine two traps.

Words in two rows are the hardest. Environment has a v and a hidden vowel; television is borrowed and has an s that sounds like z. Give those extra attention.

A method that trains the ear first

Because many of these mistakes start with hearing, a list alone will not fix them. The method has to start with sound.

First, listen to each word spoken by a native speaker and say it back slowly, exaggerating the part you get wrong. For the w and v words, check your lips. For the hidden vowels, say the word in careful syllables, dif-fer-ent, en-vi-ron-ment, so that every written vowel gets a voice.

Second, type or write the word from memory, without looking. Check it letter by letter. When a letter is wrong, find the sound it belongs to and say that part again before you retype the whole word. The reading researcher Linnea Ehri calls this process orthographic mapping: a spelling becomes permanent when each letter is attached to a sound and a meaning you are aware of.

Third, mix the pairs. Practice west next to vest and ship next to sheep in random order rather than in blocks, so that you have to choose every time.

Finally, bring the words back over days, not minutes. Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke showed in 2006 that recalling something from memory strengthens it far more than reading it again, and research on spacing shows that reviews spread over days and weeks make it last. Spelling.School is built that way: a recorded voice says the word, you type it, the app shows exactly which letters went wrong, and it schedules the word for review with spaced repetition. A notebook and some recordings can do the same job if you keep to the schedule.

Capitals, and British or American

Persian has no capital letters, and it is written from right to left. The direction rarely causes spelling errors, but the missing capitals do. Days, months, languages, nationalities and the word I all take capitals in English: Monday, January, Persian, Iranian.

On British and American spelling: many Iranian learners grew up with a mixture, with school books in one style, IELTS preparation in British English, and films and websites in American. Both systems are correct, and IELTS and TOEFL accept either. What examiners and employers notice is mixing them, colour in one paragraph and color in the next. Choose one, keep to it, and set your spell-checker to match. Our guide to British and American spelling lists the main differences.

What to do next

Take a page of English you wrote recently and look for three things only: w and v, vowels in the middle of long words, and words that also exist in Persian. Count the errors in each group. One group will almost certainly be larger than the others, and that is where to begin.

Then practice that row of the table for a few minutes a day: listen, say it slowly, write from memory, and bring back the ones you miss. You can do it with a notebook and recordings, or with Spelling.School, which also brings extra words for the patterns you keep missing. For the bigger picture, read why English spelling is so hard for non-native speakers, and if you also read Arabic, the spelling mistakes Arabic speakers make covers the habits of a closely related script.

Questions people ask

Why do Persian speakers mix up w and v in English?

Iranian Persian has a v sound but no separate w sound, so English w is often heard and said as v. This makes pairs such as west and vest or wine and vine sound alike, and leads to spellings like vest for west or, through overcorrection, wery for very. Feeling the difference helps: for v the top teeth touch the lower lip, and for w the lips round and touch nothing. Dari speakers, whose Persian has a w sound, usually find this easier.

Why do Farsi speakers leave out vowels when spelling English?

The Persian script normally writes only the long vowels, so readers are used to supplying the short vowels from their knowledge of the word. English writes every vowel, including weak, unstressed ones that are hard to hear, such as the middle vowels in different and environment. The combination makes it easy to drop or swap those vowels. Saying long words slowly, syllable by syllable, and finding a related word where the vowel is clear both help.

Why do Iranians say estudent or eschool?

Persian does not allow two consonants at the start of a syllable, so borrowed words that start with s plus a consonant get an extra vowel in front, as in eski for ski and estadyom for stadium. Persian speakers sometimes carry this helper vowel into English speech, and occasionally into spelling. Practicing words such as student, school and street slowly, with no sound before the s, removes the habit.

Which English words do Persian speakers misspell most often?

Common errors involve w and v, as in west, will and very; th, as in think and three; hidden middle vowels, as in different, separate and environment; and words borrowed into Persian from French, such as address, television and telephone, which learners often spell the Persian or French way. Words with silent double letters, such as committee and accommodation, are also frequent problems.

Does knowing Persian help with English spelling?

Yes, in one important way. Persian has several letters for the same sound, such as three letters for s and four for z, so Persian speakers already know that you sometimes have to learn which spelling belongs to which word. English works the same way for many sounds. Persian also allows consonant clusters at the end of words, so English endings such as -st and -nd are rarely a problem.

Should Persian speakers use British or American spelling?

Either is correct, and IELTS, TOEFL and most employers accept both. Many Iranian learners mix the two because they met English in different places, such as British-style exam preparation and American films. The important thing is consistency: choose one system, use it throughout each document, and set your spell-checker to the same variety.

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