"Persian: difficult but loveable": Perpetuating the myth of Persian / Farsi as a difficult language

Here's another article that seems to accept as a given that Persian is somehow a super difficult language to learn. The only difficult part of Persian is the writing system; besides that it's the easiest Indo-European language I've seen, except perhaps for Afrikaans. The other thing that makes it not so easy to study of course is the lack of opportunity to use it, but that has nothing to do with the ease of learning the language itself, simply a lack of outside impetus to learn it.

So what makes it easier than the rest? Here are a few:

• Every single verb conjugates regularly in the past tense. Absolutely no exceptions. The only irregularity you find in verbs is an irregular present tense stem sometimes, but once you know the stem you conjugate it like any other verb, again with no exceptions.
  
• No articles. Sure English uses articles too, but not every language uses them in the same way which is why you say "Ich bin Portier"(I'm a doorman) in German without the article, and la philosophie perse (Persian philosophy) in French, with the article where English has none. Persian has none of this.
• No grammatical gender. German, French, Italian, Spanish etc. all have this.

The way to make Persian an easier language to learn is to avoid all Arabic letters through the first year. Just like people first learn languages without having to write them in a foreign script (to a baby any script is just as foreign as the Arabic script is to an English speaker, but to an English speaker the Latin alphabet is so natural that it doesn't count) Persian should be learned during the first year without it. After that, go slowly into the Perso-Arabic script and learn how to write all the grammar the students have been working on over the past year.

Just to give an example of how ridiculously easy verbs are in Persian:

• All verbs end with -dan or -tan. The verb 'to be' is budan.
  
• Remove the -an part of the ending and you have the past tense stem. For 3rd person nothing is added to this. That means that bud is he/she/it was.
• Now put a word in front of that. Let's go with garm, which means warm. Garm bud. It was warm. Done!
• How about I? The stem for I is -am. Garm budam. I was warm. Done!

So where's a good place to learn Persian without the Perso-Arabic script? Here's a pdf that's quite good, and also as HTML (edit a few months later: this link doesn't work anymore. I have the document still though so contact me if you'd like it. This book here is also not too bad and has audio files as well) if you don't like downloading pdf files. People learning Persian would probably be best off starting with something like this, if only to get the point across that this isn't some language of Herculean difficulty that only savants can master. It's perfectly doable for anyone that wants to put the effort in.

(And no I don't speak Persian yet but through doing just 10 minutes a day before my regular studies for the past few months I have no trouble with deciphering simple sentences, even in the Perso-Arabic script.)