B1.3 – Daily and Social Topics

Overview of Daily and Social Topics

In this chapter you move from basic survival Persian to more natural, adult conversation. Instead of only saying “I like coffee” or “Where is the bus,” you begin to talk about your real life: your education, your work, your hobbies, your society, and your culture. The focus here is not on new grammar, but on expanding your vocabulary and learning recurring patterns that appear in everyday social topics.

You will meet many useful nouns, verbs, and fixed expressions that you can reuse in many contexts. At B1 level, sounding natural often means combining simple grammar with richer vocabulary and good topic phrases.

Throughout this chapter, remember that Persian has a neutral, relatively “flat” intonation, and that you can stay in simple present and simple past for most descriptions. Do not worry about advanced tenses here, because they are treated in other parts of the course. Focus instead on how people actually talk about everyday life and social issues.

Talking About Your Daily World

When you discuss daily and social topics, several basic patterns appear again and again. These patterns are already known to you from earlier levels, but you will now fill them with more complex content.

You will often use sentences that begin with “I” or “we” plus a verb of opinion or description. For example:

man dars mixunam.
“I study.”

mā kār mikonim.
“We work.”

man fekr mikonam ke …
“I think that …”

man dust dāram ke …
“I like to …”

These same patterns expand naturally to more specific topics. For example, to talk about your routine around education, work, or travel, you can use:

ruz-hāye hafte man sobh sā‘at haft bīdār mišam.
“On weekdays I wake up at seven in the morning.”

šab-hā aksaran ketāb mixunam.
“At nights I usually read books.”

ba doost-ham ziād harf mizanim.
“I talk a lot with my friends.”

Notice that you do not need special grammar: present tense, some adverbs of time, and a richer vocabulary already let you give mini‑presentations about your life.

When you move to social topics, such as traditions, media, or travel experiences, similar structures help:

be nazar-e man eğitim besyār mohem-e.
“In my opinion, education is very important.”

man fekr mikonam safar be hame komak mikone nazar-ešun ro bāz konan.
“I think travel helps everyone to open their views.”

You will reuse these opinion and description frames in all five subtopics of this unit.

Describing Groups and Relationships

Daily and social topics often involve groups of people, such as classmates, colleagues, or family members, and your relationship with them. At B1 level you should be comfortable with plural forms and simple relative information.

You can describe your environment like this:

hamkelas-hā-ye man az kešvar-hāye mokhtalef hastand.
“My classmates are from different countries.”

hamkār-hā-ye man aksaran javunand.
“My colleagues are mostly young.”

doost-hā-ye man ziād film-e irāni negāh mikonan.
“My friends watch a lot of Iranian films.”

When you talk about social circles, verbs of communication and socializing become important, such as:

harf zadan “to talk”,
didār kardan “to visit”,
payām dādan “to message”,
da‘vat kardan “to invite”,
šenāxtan “to know (a person)”.

By combining these with time words and adverbs, you can describe how you keep in touch and what kind of life you have:

ma‘mulan āxar-e hafte bā doost-ham didār mikonam.
“I usually meet my friends at the weekend.”

man ba khānevāde-am ziād payām midam.
“I message my family a lot.”

Social life is a natural topic with native speakers. Being able to explain briefly what you and the people around you do, believe, and enjoy already creates a rich conversation, even with simple grammar.

Topics of Conversation in Persian

At this level, you also learn what is considered natural or polite to talk about in Persian speaking contexts. People often like to ask you about your country, your studies, your job, your travels, and your feelings about life in Iran, Afghanistan, or other Persian speaking communities.

You will often hear questions such as:

če reshte-i mixuni?
“What subject are you studying?”

kojā kār mikoni?
“Where do you work?”

az kojā āmadi?
“Where are you from?”

irān rā če xelī didi?
“How did you find Iran?” or “What do you think of Iran?”

For each topic, you can prepare a set of short, flexible answers, and then add details. For example, for education you might say:

man dār-am reshte-ye mohāndesi mixunam.
“I am studying engineering.”

bāz ham mitavāni ezāfe koni:
“In addition you can add:”

raste-ye man sakhte, vali jaleb-e.
“My field is difficult but interesting.”

Similar patterns apply to work, hobbies, and cultural topics. Try to keep a bank of 5 to 10 key sentences about each important area of your life, all using vocabulary that you build in this chapter.

Moving from Personal Life to Social Themes

One important movement at B1 level is from purely individual information to more social and general themes. Instead of only saying “I like movies,” you begin to say things like “Young people in my country like action movies” or “Education is expensive in my city.”

To do this, you often need:

General subjects like “people,” “young people,” “students,” “women,” “families.”

Adjectives describing society such as modern, traditional, expensive, difficult, independent.

Verbs of opinion and evaluation like think, believe, agree, prefer.

Useful patterns are:

dar kešvar-e man javun-hā zyād film tamāšā mikonan.
“In my country young people watch a lot of films.”

be nazar-e man āmuzesh bayad rāyegān bāšad.
“In my opinion education should be free.”

xānevāde barā-ye farhang-e mā besyār mohem-e.
“Family is very important for our culture.”

You are not expected here to make complex arguments. That belongs to later levels. At B1 your goal is to describe facts and simple opinions clearly, with enough vocabulary to cover everyday and social topics.

Typical Tasks at This Level

By the end of this unit, you should be able to do several typical tasks comfortably:

Describe your educational path, your school or university life, and your future study plans, using mostly present and past simple.

Talk about your job or the job you would like to have, explain your working hours, tasks, and feelings about work.

Explain how you use technology and media in everyday life, such as your mobile, internet, social networks, and news sources.

Talk about your favorite types of travel and holidays, and describe past trips in simple past.

Describe some cultural traditions from your own culture and from Persian speaking cultures, including important festivals, family customs, and food.

All of these tasks use the same basic grammar, but each one demands its own vocabulary. In the following subchapters, you will collect the most important words and expressions for each of these themes, and practice combining them in natural mini‑conversations and short monologues.

Vocabulary Review for Daily and Social Topics

The table below gives a selection of important words and phrases that are especially useful for talking about daily and social topics at B1 level. You will see and use many of them again in the subchapters.

Use this vocabulary as your toolbox for all the daily and social topics that follow. As you move through the next subchapters, pay attention to how these words combine in natural patterns and short, fluent paragraphs.