finglishdictabandoned /// not under active development

A do-it-yourself Persian transliteration dictionary. Add and search for words to help yourself learn!

Learning a language is difficult, especially when the language itself is in a non-Latin character set. At present, I don't have the time to properly learn Persian, but I would like to learn how to speak it. Unfortunately, the major Persian-English dictionaries I've been able to find merely provide a standard translation, without any hint as to how to actually pronounce the Persian words.

FinglishDict was my solution. At its core, this app was just a simple reference list for user-added English words, their Persian transliterations, and a pronunciation guide for each. The idea was that you could add your own words to it to keep track, and refer back as needed.

Since transliterated Persian ("Farsi-English", or "finglish", where the app gets its name) is more of a byproduct of Persian speakers adapting the language to the Latin alphabet, there are few, if any, comprehensive resources to assist one in learning it without also learning written Farsi. To get around this, the app originally implemented ChatGPT to provide the transliteration of any given word. Unfortunately, the accuracy of ChatGPT's translations was too low, around 60% by my estimation. Accordingly, a user could not have confidence that the answers being provided were accurate, requiring either a friend who spoke Persian to help you, or constant references to a Persian-English dictionary, at which point...

Why bother with the app at all?

The underlying skeleton may be of use in the future for a DIY reference app that is less domain-specific, but for now this project has been abandoned in favor of others.