1
Wikipedia has a list of differences.2
There are a couple of characters that occur in Farsi that don't occur in Arabic. A ج with three dots under for example (a ch sound, which doesn't exist in Arabic).If it has a word that looks like this عربي or this عربية, then it' probably says Arabic spoken.
If it has a word that looks like فارسي then it probably says Farsi spoken.
But you're in southern California, right? Most likely it's Farsi. Is it in a shop? Why not ask the shopkeeper?
Also they usually write Farsi in a more swoopy kind of style. like the big letters here. That says Farsi, so if you see that, it says they speak Farsi.)
4
Farsi usually looks more like handwritten (swoopy) rather than printed (i.e. Fari uses a different "font" than Arabic) - and if it is handwritten Farsi isn't "stacked" on top of each other as much as Arabic often is (i.e. the letters in handwritten Arabic often move from upper right to lower left instead of just right to left)5
There is no such a thing as "Farsi" script, it's called Perso-Arabic, and the language's name in English is Persian too, enough with this "Farsi" bullshit, you don't go around calling German 'Deutsch' or Greek 'ellinika'.The easiest way to tell at a quick glance is to look for the following letters: گ آ (the first one exist only word-initially)
As you can see in the wiki links above there are others that specific for Persian but for the untrained eye it would be difficult to tell (especially if the font is small) the first 3 from the standard Arabic ﺯ ب and ﺝ
6
soylentyellow, it's called Nastaleeq http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasta%CA%BFl%C4%ABqUrdu is also written in that style, someone I know once described it as it's written with chocolate that's melted from the sun.
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