Testimonial by Dafna Messing

During July 2020 I attended the three-week APIRANTUM intermediate Persian Summer School. Although it took place via Zoon, due to the Coronavirus pandemic circumstances, I feel very glad to participate in this program, as it was highly beneficial for me and I enjoyed it very much.

Mr. Voskanian is an excellent and a very welcoming teacher. Each class I was amazed by his incredible knowledge in the Persian language and its peculiarities, as well as his general knowledge in so many topics, such as history, religion, politics, geography and culture.

The classes were taught almost entirely in Persian, and every class was dedicated to a specific subject related to Iran. The classes addressed both political topics and cultural ones, such as Iranian history, art, music, cinema cuisine, literature-classic Persian and colloquial Persian. I personally liked the cultural classes best, as I was exposed to an interesting world that I didn’t know much about.

ASPIRANTUM Persian Summer School is a very unique program in the sense that the process of the language learning combines the steps of translating from a text, translating from hearing and conducting a conversation with the fellow students entirely in Persian. Thanks to that, each day I felt that the level of my Persian skills were improving significantly.

I appreciate this experience, and highly recommend it to anyone who would like to utilize his Persian skills by learning from the best while having a great time. Looking forward to attending next year’s Summer school in Yerevan in person.