Beginner’s Persian (Iranian Farsi) with Online Audio (Hippocrene Beginner's)

Persian is written with the Arabic script, and is normally written without vowels. If you don't know a word already, then figuring out the vowels is basically impossible. Lessons 1-3 include transcriptions for new vocabulary, along with the Arabic script spelling. At lesson 4 the transcriptions just... stop. You have to determine it from the audio files, which is not at all helpful for people without a good ear, and makes vocab memorization a pain.To add to the confusion, the transcriptions often have typos, with regular confusion between 'a' and 'ā', which does matter. A few words have letters jumbled in ways that suggest the word processor used to typeset this book was confused between left to right and right to left scripts.