Drops Farsi Review: Pretty but Empty

Every morning in Milan, I have an espresso at the bar downstairs. One shot. Thirty seconds. It's satisfying, it wakes me up, and it is absolutely not breakfast.

Drops is the espresso of language apps. Five minutes of beautifully designed vocabulary games. One quick hit. Visually gorgeous. And absolutely, categorically not a meal.

The app limits free sessions to 5 minutes per day. This is marketed as a feature. "Learn a language in just 5 minutes!". and it's the most honest lie in language learning. You will learn something in 5 minutes. You will learn a word. Maybe two. In Persian script, with a pretty illustration. Whether those words accumulate into anything resembling communication with an actual Iranian? That requires a different kind of app entirely.

What Drops Is

Drops is a vocabulary-only app with exceptional visual design. You learn words through gesture-based mini-games: swipe to match, tap to select, drag to connect. Each word comes with an illustration, native audio, and Persian script. No sentences. No grammar. No conversation practice. Just individual words, beautifully presented.

Pricing: Free for 5-minute daily sessions. Premium unlocks unlimited practice time at roughly $9-15/month (varies by plan), or a $150 lifetime option. Persian is available with vocabulary organized into themed categories: food, travel, nature, numbers, etc.

What Drops Does Well

The Design Is Genuinely Beautiful

I don't say this lightly: Drops is the best-looking language app I've ever used. The illustrations are distinctive, the animations are smooth, and the overall experience feels more like a well-crafted game than a study tool. For people who've been turned off by the clinical ugliness of most language apps, Drops is refreshing.

Persian Script Introduction

Drops displays every word in Persian script alongside the illustration and audio. You'll see آب. âb. water, paired with a cute water droplet illustration. For visual learners who want low-pressure exposure to the alphabet, this passive exposure builds familiarity over time. You won't learn to read fluently, but you'll start recognizing common letter shapes like ب (be), ن (nun), and م (mim).

The 5-Minute Limit Is Psychologically Smart

The timer creates artificial scarcity. "I can only practice for 5 minutes" becomes "I need to practice every day before my time runs out." This builds habit more effectively than apps with unlimited access that you keep putting off. For consistency. the single most important factor in language learning. the time limit works.

What You Actually Learn in 30 Days

I used Drops daily for a month. Five minutes a day, every day, no skips. Here's exactly what that bought me.

After 30 sessions, I could recognize roughly 90-100 isolated words. Things like نان. nân. bread, ماشین. mâshin. car, گربه. gorbe. cat, سیب. sib. apple. All nouns. Almost exclusively nouns. The app does include some verbs buried in its categories, but the gesture-matching format works so much better for concrete objects that nouns dominate the experience.

Here's what I could NOT do after 30 days: form a single sentence. I knew the word for water (آب. âb) but couldn't say "Can I have water?" (میشه آب بدید؟. mishe âb bedid?). I knew the word for house (خانه. khâne) but couldn't say "Where is your house?" I couldn't even say "I want" (می‌خواهم. mikhâham) because Drops doesn't teach verbs in any usable way.

Thirty days. One hundred words. Zero sentences. That's the Drops experience for Farsi.

The vocabulary selection is also odd. In one of the early categories, I learned the Persian word for "penguin" (پنگوئن. panguan) before I learned "thank you" (ممنون. mamnun). I could identify a dolphin (دلفین. dolfin) before I could say "yes" (بله. bale) or "no" (نه. na). The categories are organized by visual themes (animals, nature, food) rather than by communication priority. It's the kind of curriculum designed by someone who thinks about vocabulary as a collection, not as a tool.

Why Pretty Isn't Enough

Words Without Glue

Drops teaches you نان. nân. bread, آب. âb. water, ماشین. mâshin. car. Individual nouns. No verbs, no sentence structures, no connecting particles. After a month with Drops, you'll know the Farsi words for 100 objects and be unable to ask for a single one of them.

This is the same Vocabulary Graveyard problem I describe with Memrise, but worse. because Memrise at least teaches some phrases. Drops is vocabulary cards with nice graphics. Period.

No Grammar, No Sentences, No Communication

Persian grammar has quirks that you simply cannot absorb from isolated vocabulary: SOV word order, the ezāfe construction (کتاب بزرگ. ketâb-e bozorg. the big book), verb conjugation, the formal/spoken register split. Drops teaches none of this. You learn the word for "go" (رفتن. raftan) but not how to say "I want to go" (می‌خوام برم. mikhâm beram), "I went" (رفتم. raftam), or "let's go" (بریم. berim).

Formal Register Only

Every word in Drops is the dictionary/formal version. You learn خانه. khâne. house (formal) but not خونه. khune. house (how every Iranian actually says it). You get می‌خواهم. mikhâham. I want (written) instead of می‌خوام. mikhâm (spoken). There's no colloquial layer, no awareness that the language has two lives.

Drops vs. Memrise for Farsi

Since both occupy the "vocabulary app" category:

Memrise offers more substance. Drops offers more style. For Farsi specifically, Memrise is the better choice because even its limited phrase-level content puts you closer to actual communication than Drops' isolated words ever will.

The Script Problem Nobody Mentions

Drops shows you Persian script, sure. But it never teaches you how Persian script works. The alphabet is connected. letters change shape depending on whether they appear at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. The letter ب (be) looks different in بابا. bâbâ. dad, than it does standing alone. Drops shows you the finished word and expects pattern recognition to do the rest.

After a month, I could recognize نان (bread) as a unit. the way you recognize a logo. but I couldn't sound out unfamiliar words. I wasn't reading Persian. I was recognizing flashcards. There's a difference, and it matters the moment you see a word Drops didn't teach you, like a street sign in Tehran or a message from a friend.

The app also doesn't teach you that Persian is written right-to-left, doesn't explain the dots that distinguish ب (be) from پ (pe) from ت (te) from ث (se), and doesn't address short vowels. which aren't written in standard Persian text. These aren't advanced topics. They're day-one basics that any serious script introduction would cover. Drops skips all of it because teaching you to actually read would require more than a swipe-to-match game.

If you want to actually learn the Persian alphabet, use a dedicated resource. Anki with a script deck, or even YouTube tutorials, will get you reading in a week. Drops won't get you there in a year.

Rating: 3.5 / 10

Who Should Use Drops for Farsi

The toilet scroller. If you're going to spend 5 minutes on your phone anyway, Drops turns that into vocabulary exposure. It's better than Instagram. It's not better than Anki, but it's prettier.

The visual learner who needs gentle exposure. If the Persian script intimidates you and you want passive, no-pressure exposure to how the characters look alongside illustrations, Drops provides that in a non-threatening format.

Children. The game-like interface works well for kids who might be learning Persian heritage vocabulary. No expectations of grammar, just word-picture associations. My friend's 7-year-old loves it. she can now point at animals and say the Farsi name, which is charming. She also can't ask for a glass of آب (âb. water) in a complete sentence, but she's seven, so the bar is different.

Who Should Spend Their Time Elsewhere

Anyone who wants to communicate. Drops will not help you speak, read, write, or understand Farsi in any functional context. Five minutes of vocabulary matching per day produces recognition, not ability.

Anyone paying for it. At $9-15/month, Drops competes against Pimsleur ($20/month, full sentence training), LingQ ($10/month, unlimited reading), and italki tutors ($5-15/session, actual humans). The premium price is indefensible for what amounts to a flashcard app.

The Espresso Verdict

I love my morning espresso. I will never mistake it for a meal. Drops is delightful, well-crafted, and entirely insufficient for learning Farsi. Use it for free, for five minutes, as a vocabulary appetizer. Then go eat an actual meal. (See how Drops compares to every other option in my best apps for learning Farsi ranking.)

Want a structured approach that actually teaches you to speak? Check out my recommended Farsi tools. I've tested them all so you don't have to.

Ready for the full meal instead of a sip?
Book a lesson with me on Preply. one session teaches more than a month of 5-minute games.

For the full comparison of every Farsi learning tool, see our complete resource guide.

Get it wrong and the worst that happens is a warm laugh and a story they’ll tell for years. Get it right — refuse the tea twice, accept on the third — and you’ll watch a face open up. You didn’t just speak Persian. You played the game.