Mostly I used Byki, which I found extremely helpful. It provides a visual, audio, and a slow-audio. It's mix-up feature also helped me drill those words into my head. It wasn't good for learning to write the words, however. I'm not at the point where I can easily discern how characters change when in the middle of a word (there are 2-3 forms of each character), so it took me a full ten minutes to type one word in Byki. I haven't met with my learning partner yet, but we finally figured out a schedule and hopefully she'll be able to help with this.
I also spent a lot of time looking for Iranian music. It turns out I am not particularly fond of Iranian music. I like a lot of the traditional stuff, but what I could find of good audio quality didn't have vocals. In the end I picked a few songs (some metal - yes! Farsi metal! - some rock, some pop, a particularly well done rap song, and one traditional song with vocals) that hopefully I'll like more when I get used to them. It is really interesting to see the cultural differences, not only in musical styles, but pure vocal styles. The tone of vocals is completely different, more vibrato, in Farsi music. I wonder how that relates to speech patterns and inflection.
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