This book has a few key points that actually do make it worth the price - I watched on and off for a year and the cheapest I ever saw was $119. I use this in conjunction with the Combined New Persian-English and English-Persian Dictionary, by Manoochehr Aryanpur-Kashani and Abbad Aryanpur-Kashani, by Mazda Publishing. These are the two best dictionaries I've found so far.
The good:
- The Thematic Dictionary lists the Farsi text as well as transliterated pronunciations in English rather than a crazy linguistic phonics system that's about as complicated as the Farsi alphabet itself. It's amazing how difficult that is to find. Personally, I like to guess on the pronunciation, but also to check and see if I'm right. This book lets me confirm or correct as needed.
- It lists the stems of irregular verbs right next to the verb itself.
- It does list synonyms (in English) and slang.
The first two I would call invaluable for anyone looking to learn Farsi. As all things do, however, it does have its flaws:
- Everything's listed alphabetically by the Farsi alphabet, so the index of English words is a must. It gets annoying quickly when you're looking up more than a few words at once. It's still worth it, and (for me, at least) it's incentive to remember the vocab you're looking up.
- Trying to look up a word in Farsi when you don't know what it means is pretty much impossible with this book, since you'd both have to know what category it falls into and hope it's the same as the word listed, since synonyms are of course an issue. So if you're serious about learning the language, you do need a regular dictionary as well.