A site for English teachers, translators and Students of English in Iran

This site helps Iranian students to learn English. By answering their specific questions, it also provides support and advice to English teachers and translators in areas of difficulties. It is also useful for those who simply want to stay in touch with English and prevent it from evaporating from their minds.

Sue Petrovski is a western writer who loves Mowlana Jalal Od-Din Mohammad, known as Rumi in the West. She is also in love with Mowlana’s country and culture. That is why she is generously and so graciously with us, with Rumi’s fellow countrymen and women, to help us grapple with the vicissitudes of learning English as a foreign language. Difficulties become sweet memories when you have such a great, kind scholar beside you. Just listen to her words:

"Oh, to be able to cross that gap that separates man from man and woman from woman. Oh, to know what you are thinking and what you expect of me. Oh, to be able to have walked down your streets, lived with your clans, and drank and supped and felt as you have felt. Oh, to have done those things. What a wondrous gift that would be, and what a mystery that consciousness, that gift of human kind, is so boxed in and confounded. Is it some kind of test that God instilled in our being, or is it something we must work to correct? Can we in any way train ourselves to be able to see through another's eyes?

The only solution to our self-only knowledge is to go to those lands we have never mentally considered before. We can read Thoreau, or the Bible, or Joseph Campbell or Rumi, or the Sufi Prophets and gain new dimension to our thoughts. We can flesh out one idea with another and another and another – a fountain of different thoughts flowing out from a central theme. We will never understand all that the Other believes and carries in that wondrous mind of theirs, but we can begin to see the breadth of all thought, and through the process, our ethical, moral, and social senses will expand and grow.

'It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensive, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.' - Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim"

Whether you are an English teacher or a translator or if you are simply a student of English as a foreign language, please click on the word “comment” below and start talking to us. Whatever you say is welcomed and your questions will be answered. You can also send a personal email to: a.z.mirror@gmail.com

Dear Sue,
Nice to hear from you again. Thank you for correcting my letter. In Iran we have blacks in south of Iran. I saw them when I went to Kish. They speak to Arabic, if you ask about their country, all of them will say: we are an Iranian. In Iran we have racial prejudice, but it isn’t for blacks. It is for an Afghanian worker. They are very poor peoplesatirize them for theirdialect.
I insist you say my mistakes to me, if you have time, please.
After exams I will write more.
I am so sorry for my mistakes.
Take care,
Bahman