Testimonial by Michail Kitsos

As a scholar of late antique Christianity and Judaism, I have been wanting to learn Grabar for many years because learning this language would give me access to a wealth of primary sources on Christianity east of Byzantium.

With no prior knowledge of Armenian and with thinking how difficult this language seemed and after browsing the available English grammars on classical Armenian, I enrolled in this class after having received the reassurance from Dr. Ani Shahnazaryan, the Instructor of Grabar, that no previews knowledge of classical Armenian was required.

This class was a blast and so beneficial! Our Instructor, Dr. Ani Shahnazaryan, not only is extremely knowledgeable of Classical and Middle Armenian, but her teaching methodology is superb. She makes sure that we learn each grammatical rule during class so that at home the review is much easier. In each class, we would cover a new grammar rule which she always explained with profound clarity. For each grammatical rule, Dr. Ani Shahnazaryan would provide numerous examples, enough for each student to practice multiple times per lesson, to help us learn the new grammatical rules already during class. For homework, she would give us multiple sentences to translate from Classical Armenian to English accompanied with detailed vocabulary. The sentences would cover the grammatical rules we learned so far per lesson. By the end of this class, I have been equipped with a solid knowledge of grammar and with a foundational knowledge of vocabulary, being able to study primary sources in Classical Armenian. In the end, Dr. Ani Shahnazaryan made the learning of classical Armenian a wonderful learning experience!