Testimonial by Daniel Selden

For my whole life — and I am now 66 years old — I have been learning and teaching foreign languages.

I currently speak or read somewhere near 20 different languages from around the world, mainly different branches of Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic.

Of all the language teachers that I have encountered over the years, Ani Beyt-Movsess is unquestionably the best. Not only is she extremely courteous, thoughtful, patient, and attentive. She clearly knows Persian grammar inside and out.

For me, in fact, she is the ideal teacher, in part because she has a graduate degree in older Persian linguistics (Avestan, Old Persian, and Pahlavi—earlier form of the langauge that I have studied), which means that she can explain unusual forms for me (e.g. خواھر > Pahlavi xv-) and understands the kind of technical questions about Persian, its relation to Indo-European and to Semitic languages, that I often ask.

I had worked previously over the summer with a Persian langauge instructor from the University of Wisconsin — Madison who, when I asked her a grammatical question, either did not understand what I was asking or gave me the wrong answer. With Ani, I have never had that kind of problem.

Together we worked more on grammatical and syntactic structures than on listening and speaking, but that is fine for me since I am learning Persian mainly to read passages in classical Persian poetry that I need for my research. I would also like to be able to speak contemporary Farsi, but this is for me a secondary concern.

In short, I think that Ani is a great asset to ASPIRANTUM's program. I should perhaps also mention that her English is completely fluent, which helps a great deal when more complex grammatical structures need to be discussed. I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to work with her.