How different are they?
Persian (or Farsi) and Arabic have unique traits – Neither Persian nor Arabic is spoken exclusively in one country or region. Both languages are widely used throughout Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Western Asia. They also differ in how they sound.
Persian vowels can be short or long (like English), but Arabic vowels aren’t usually prolonged. Also, Persian has a lot of words borrowed from other cultures over its history, including French and English. Plus, it has many letters representing a single sound; for example, s is often written as ص. And that’s not all! There are some significant differences between these two languages.
For instance, Arabic uses an alphabet called abjad, which only uses consonants to write down words. On top of that, each letter represents only one sound—so you never need to worry about confusing similar-looking letters as you do with Roman alphabets like English.
However, because there are no vowels in an abjad script, native speakers sometimes use diacritics to indicate when a vowel should be pronounced. This makes reading more difficult than if there were actual vowel sounds included in the script. Persian has no diacritics, so it’s easier to read than Arabic scripts without them. But unlike Arabic scripts, Persian isn’t limited to just consonants; it includes four basic vowel sounds that appear at different points within words.
Similar Words in Both Languages
Persian is mostly mutually intelligible with dialects of Farsi (i.e., Dari) in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, as well as other Iranian languages like Kurdish, Balochi, etc. It’s also related to languages spoken in Iraq (e.g., Mandaean), Turkey (e.g., Luri), Caucasus countries like Armenia or Azerbaijan, etc.
It’s pretty safe to say that if you know one of these languages, you can pick up Persian reasonably quickly; however, it’s also true that if you know a different Indo-European language (like Spanish or French), Persian will seem familiar, but very strange at first.
In terms of vocabulary, some words are similar in both languages (e.g., shah for king). However, there are many more words that are similar only because they have been borrowed from each other over time; for example, dastur means the rule of law in both languages but comes from an entirely different root word in each case (dast means hand and dar mean holding/supporting). In short, while there are some similarities between Persian and Arabic due to historical contact between them (and their mutual Semitic roots), they’re not all that similar. They’re pretty distinct from each other.