Iran Three - Transcription
I was born in Tehran, Iran... um... Actually today is my birthday, forty-five years ago. And I was raised there. My family, my father and my mom, they were from northeast of Iran. Ummm... All of her parents, relatives used to live there. And, but, we lived in Tehran and we raised in Tehran. Uh... But my best memory that I have was uh going to that city all summer. Uh. The whole summer as a vacation and to spend times with my cousins and um and aunts and uncles. In Iran we had English as a second language. It just like basically over here that they teach you there Spanish or French in classes. Basically we learned more uh words uh vocabulary and very small grammars, like, "this is a pen, that is a door..." Those kind of things. Uh when I was uh after I graduated from High School I had planned to come to United States, and I start taking some English classes at English, American schools. And uh I had a teacher named Mr. Carter, at that time. I remember him. I took about uh one year of grammars and then I came over here. And of course when I came here first the accent was very hard for me to understand because basically what we learned in Iran was English not American and the other thing that was very weird for me I did notice that most of the people they weren't using the whole grammar they were sort of eating the words and it was hard, like you had to get used to it. And someone gave me an advice if you want learn a better English you should listen to the news. In Iran we have different kind of languages...Farsi's not just the only one...but I just knew how to speak Farsi, but if you go to different kind...different part of country you see Turkish, Kurdish,even when you went to my parents' home town they had their own accent - they had their own vocabulary sometimes which if for someone who is not used to their culture when they went to that city if they asked to give me a match and used different kinds of words [indistinct] you were kind of excuse me what did you say. So it just ...you can see lots of different languages. They have all kinds of religions but the majority is Muslim. Shi'ite. [speaks in Farsi and then translates] Today is a beautiful day and I am very happy to be here.
Transcribed by Theresa Buchheister and Paul Meier