How I Learned Persian While Hiding It From My Family
No classroom, no permission: how a secret Facebook group taught me Persian one correction at a time.
For a few years in university I had two completely separate schedules. Daytime was lectures for a degree I’d chosen for reasons that no longer made sense to me. Nighttime was a Facebook group with thousands of members, where I helped Iranians fix the Italian they were learning badly from people who barely spoke it, explaining every correction in Persian because that was really just a way to keep my own Persian alive. My parents knew about the group. To them it was time stolen from my “real” future, something more useful I should be doing instead. What they never understood was that it was the only thing keeping me afloat.
Persian was never the plan. I just couldn’t let go of my curiosity about a country everyone around me was sure they already understood.
It Started With Arabic, Not Persian
Persian wasn’t actually the first language I taught myself with nobody around me speaking it. Years earlier, in middle school, I became fixated on Arabic. None of my own classmates were Moroccan, they were all placed in a different section of the school, but that didn’t stop me from seeking them out simply because I was curious about them. One summer I taught myself the Arabic alphabet using the same trick I still rely on for every new alphabet: spelling Italian words with it. It’s an awkward method and far from precise, but it beats starting from zero.
From there I copied out sentences from an old Arabic-Italian dictionary, one with a short grammar section in the back, the bare-bones kind that exists purely to make the sentences function rather than grammar taught for its own sake. To finally understand why certain letters had two near-identical versions carrying entirely different sounds, I turned to YouTube pronunciation videos from a channel called Learn Arabic with Maha. And then there was a classmate a couple of years older than me who became so invested in my obsession that she started handwriting little quizzes just for me: numbers, seasons, a sentence to translate like “I have three apples.” I’d complete them during boring lessons and pass them back at break. She’d mark them and return them. That kind of generosity has stayed with me.
Then middle school ended, Hungarian pulled my attention away, and Arabic faded into the background. It came back the moment I picked up Persian, because approaching Persian with zero Arabic is a bit like approaching French with no Latin behind you. It’s possible. It’s just unnecessarily difficult.
Falling for a Language I’d Never Heard Spoken
If I trace the Persian story to its real starting point, it begins in 2011, with geopolitics, not language.
My childhood primed me to pay closer attention to that part of the world than most people do. I saw 9/11 unfold live on TV. I attended a Catholic school and remember the army showing up outside it because the building counted as a possible target. The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, then the Iraq war, weren’t distant news stories to me, they were simply part of growing up. So when Iran took over the headlines during the Ahmadinejad years and the Green Movement, I caught the mismatch immediately: the coverage treated Iran as basically interchangeable with Afghanistan, which it absolutely isn’t. I started reading an Italian geopolitics magazine, and that gap between assumption and reality is exactly the kind of gap that pulls me in. It still does, with anything I get curious about.
For me, an interest in a country always turns into an interest in its language. So, as I do with every language, I went straight to Omniglot and played the sample recording, the first article of the Declaration of Human Rights, read aloud. Nothing had ever sounded like that to me before. If someone asked me to picture what the language of One Thousand and One Nights would actually sound like, this would be it. I decided on the spot that I had to learn it.
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I picked up a guidebook on Iran and another covering Central Asia more broadly, mainly for the phrasebooks at the back, which is always where I begin. Then, in one of the most beautiful bookshops in Milan, I bought a real coursebook, and it remains the best language coursebook I’ve ever owned, in any language. Published before the Islamic Revolution, some of its vocabulary has aged, but its structure was almost perfect: a handful of grammar points, immediately followed by sentences to translate from Italian into Persian and back again. Nothing was explained just to be explained. Every rule earned its place because the next sentence needed it.
My Actual Classroom Was a Facebook Group
The timing ended up being unusually lucky. 2011 and 2012 marked the start of the brain drain Iran has lived through more or less continuously since the Green Movement, and my small hometown, which happened to host a satellite campus of the Politecnico di Milano, turned into an unexpected pocket of Iranian students. Persian was suddenly something you’d overhear walking past café tables. Too shy to do much with that on my own, I memorized exactly one sentence: “Sorry, do you speak Persian?” That was my entire script, and somehow it was enough of an opening. Invitations to parties followed, then more invitations, and the more time I spent inside that community the less I needed the rehearsed line at all.
Around the same time I started helping people in a Facebook group, trading messages in Persian with a friend more out of habit than any real plan. The more I typed, the faster I improved, and the Arabic I’d picked up years before made the spelling click into place much faster than it otherwise would have. Eventually, two Iranian friends, both back living in Iran now, talked me into starting a group of my own. One of them even designed the logo. I ran that page for years, helping Iranians work through their Italian, and it’s how I landed my first job, at a trade fair in Milan with an Iranian company.
That page is also where I picked up the most important lesson about how I actually learn languages, even if I had no name for it back then. Correcting people in real time, in small doses, taught me more than any classroom ever managed to. A correction on something I’d written five minutes earlier stuck with me. A correction buried in a page of notes from a class held a week ago never did.
What Real Persian Classes Got Wrong
University complicated all of it. I couldn’t keep the Facebook group going the way I wanted to, and I kept hearing some version of “Persian isn’t profitable, why not learn Chinese instead.” At one point even my relationship got dragged into the argument. So I simply stopped mentioning it. I kept the group alive, quietly, and it turned into the one piece of my life that belonged entirely to me, while I sat through a degree I’d come to resent.
When the migration from Facebook to Instagram eventually happened, I never fully rebuilt what I’d had there. At heart, I’m still a Facebook person. One strange, vivid moment stands out from July 2019, right after I’d started my first full-time job: I corrected a small inaccuracy in a post from an influencer who’d also come out of that same Facebook group. She thanked me publicly in her stories and picked up a few hundred new followers overnight because of it. That account is gone now, for reasons unrelated to language learning, but I still think of it as one of the stranger full-circle moments from that whole stretch of time.
In 2018 I also signed up for formal Persian classes, mainly to fix mistakes I knew I’d baked in early on. They disappointed me. Every class ended with pages of notes I had no idea what to do with, no homework, no real structure, and any genuine question got the same answer: “We’ll cover that next week.” By the following class I’d already forgotten what I’d asked. I learned more from posting an imperfect sentence on Instagram and getting corrected within the hour than from any class I paid for.
That contrast is the entire reason I teach the way I do now. Not a flood of corrections once a week, but a steady drip of them, in real time, attached to something you just tried to say. Persian is where I noticed it first. Everything I build today, the daily voice notes, the writing, feedback that arrives while the mistake is still warm, traces back to a Facebook group I had to half-hide from the people I loved most, simply because I was too stubborn to give it up.
The Pattern I Didn’t See Until Persian
I didn’t build this method first and then test it on myself. It happened in the opposite order. I lived it by accident, years before I had any name for it. Hungarian meant a teenager typing back and forth on MSN Messenger, with no classroom anywhere in sight. Arabic meant a dictionary, a handful of YouTube videos, and a classmate’s handwritten quizzes. Dutch meant daily voice notes with a friend, long before that turned into something I’d offer other people. Persian is simply the version of the story where the gap between real-time correction from an actual person and a stack of notes from a classroom grew too wide to keep ignoring. Every language I’ve learned has quietly run the same experiment without my noticing. Persian is just the one where I finally sat down and read the results.
I’m Chiara Maggi, a multilingual language coach based in Brussels. I teach Italian, French, Dutch, and English to adult learners through an asynchronous method built around daily writing and voice messages, no live classes required. I write about language acquisition, obsession, and what actually works at chiaralanguagefreak.com and on my Substack, Diary of a Languagefreak.
