Whoah, hold on. This is very relevant to my interests. I'm in Chicago and the next big thing I want to do is learn Farsi (my wife is taking Japanese classes, which is not very relevant to my interests, so I can't really do it with her). Is there a particular set of books you'd recommend?

I'm actually hoping to find some place to take classes.

Your plan is awesome! The language is pure logic and terseness (all those who want „gender neutral“ language, here you are, there is no article at all, you really have to ask „is this person male or female“).

I am a German native and there are some good books for Germans that I studied with.

Yet, there are some excellent English resources! First, in order to learn to write (and much more if you want to), there is the excellent site www.easypersian.com. which offers 180+ lessons for free I learned to write there (took me two days). Then, there is „Complete Persian“ as a good textbook in English. I remember my first private language teacher I hired used this and it was really good.

I guess being married to someone who speaks the language counts as immersion :)