Tehran, IRNA - The Center for Teaching Persian to Speakers of Other Languages Allameh Tabataba'i University (AZFA) has kicked off a new semester of teaching Farsi to 140 students from 14 countries.

The Allameh Tabataba'i University held a ceremony to welcome the new students in the presence of the university's president, the head of the AZFA center, and a group of newcomers in Tehran.

The students are from Azerbaijan, Russia, China, South Korea, Iraq, Oman, Palestine, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa, Turkey, and Sri Lanka.

President of Allameh Tabataba'i University Abdollah Mo’tamedi welcomed the new Persian students and expressed hope that the foreign students would increase their skills in order to express in the Persian language what they have in mind.

Touching upon the fact when an expression is translated from one language into another, it loses many of its original characteristics; the university president argued that translation can be very different from the original text because there are linguistic aspects in the original language that cannot be seen in translation. If we are skillful in the language of the original text, we will be able to understand many of those aspects; thus, when you become familiar with the Persian language, you will obtain its underlying points and you will be able to speak better, he added.

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