Farsi Lessons: Simple Present

In this lesson you will learn about the simple present tense in Farsi. It is more difficult to conjugate than the Simple Past, let's have a look at how it works! 😊

Words between two slashes are a phonetic representation of the Farsi words, loosely based on the IPA romanization of Persian.

Reminder: Building Blocks

As we learned in the lesson Verb Basics, there are various building blocks that we can use when working with verbs in Farsi.

We need three building blocks to form verbs in the simple present:

• The present stem
• The personal endings
• The particle می /mi/

Forming the Simple Present

Unlike the past stem, the present stem cannot be derived directly from a verb's infinitive. This is why it is recommended to learn the infinitive together with the present stem when memorizing a new verb in Farsi! 💡

Let's conjugate the verb دیدَن /didan/ as an example. We need the present stem بین /bin/, the personal endings and the particle می /mi/.

Review the lesson on Farsi Verb Basics for an overview of the personal endings!

With the present stem and the personal ending in hand, we can now form the verb by simply combining them:

• verb in simple present = particle می /mi/ + present stem + personal ending

This the resulting conjugation for دیدَن /didan/:

Simple Present	Pronoun
میبینَم	مَن
/mibinam/	/man/
میبینی	تو
/mibini/	/to/
میبینَد	او
/mibinad/	/u/
---	---
میبینیم	ما
/mibinim/	/mā/
میبینید	شُما
/mibinid/	/ʃomā/
میبینَند	آن‌ها
/mibinand/	/ānhā/

---

Here are more examples of verbs and their present stems:

• بودَن /budan/ → هَست /hast/
• داشتَن /dāʃtan/ → دار /dār/
• آمَدَن /āmadan/ → آی /āy/
• رَفتَن /raftan/ → رَو /rav/
• شِنیدَن /ʃenidan/ → شِنَو /ʃenav/

And some more conjugation examples:

• او میایَد /u miāyad/ = He/She comes
• آن‌ها هَستَند /ānhā hastand/ = They are

Remember that you need to learn the present stem of a verb alongside its infinitive, because it cannot be derived 💡

Summary

Forming the simple present in Farsi requires the knowledge of the present stem, the personal endings, and a particle.

🙌 !ما فارسی یاد می گیریم
/mā fārsi yād migirim/
We're learning Farsi! 🙌