The challenges of defining Persian verbs with 'می' prefix, and compound verbs

I’m confident these issues have been mentioned before, likely much more eloquently than I’m able to manage. But I don’t find anything, so here goes. Disclaimer, I’m one year into studying Persian (with a long road ahead), and brand new to LingQ.

Some Persian verb tenses are formed by putting ‘می’ in front of a verb stem. In practice, writers often insert a space resulting in the unconnected form of the letter (‘می روم’) instead of the connected form (‘میروم’). In a LingQ Persian lesson I took (about a cook named Mike!) verbs with the prefix were written with a space between the prefix and the stem. I suppose this has the advantage of making the behind-the-scenes looking up of definitions possible or easier.

But a couple of problems result:

  1. (minor) ‘می’ is treated as a word to define. It is meaningless in this context.
  2. (more important, possibly rare, but I encountered it in my first lesson) In the Mike lesson, Mike says “I enjoy talking to customers.” ‘Enjoy’ is ‘لذت می برم’ which I’m reasonably confident is a two-part verb using the verb ‘بردن’ The 1st person singular subjunctive, spoken form of ‘رفتن’ (to go) is written the same as the ‘stem part’ of the 1st person singular present indicative of ‘بردن’. Both are ‘برم’, though they differ in the unwritten short vowels. So the wrong verb is defined.

Of course, even when the correct verb is defined, such granularity doesn’t help a lot in the case of these compound verbs. Ideally the compound verb in its entirety would be defined, since the whole can be quite different from the sum of its parts!

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In my experience, it very quickly stops mattering to you. You learn that می is a present/progressive-tense prefix (as explained in some of the suggested definitions), and then you notice that it’s sometimes written separately and sometimes joined, mostly interchangeably. (AFAIK this is the result of incomplete orthographical change, with the joined form being an older standard. Ditto for the plural suffix ها which is often still joined.)

I’ve actually come to appreciate being able to save words separate from prefixes and suffixes where applicable. But really, it’s just become a non-issue for me. I suspect it will for you, as well.

As for ambiguous words, of course Persian is not the only language with homographs and homonyms (different words that are written the same and/or sound the same). LingQ accounts for it by allowing you to save multiple definitions. In Persian, a lot of the community-supplied definitions include the pronunciation, which can help you keep apart “beram” (that I go) and “(mi-)baram” (I carry) etc.

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