Persian women have cute voices

Iranian film director Mona Zandi (مونا زندی).

Well, not all of them of course, but sometimes Persian gets a bad rap for being the official language of Iran (plus Afghanistan and Tajikistan) and so the only Persian you usually get to hear is some crusty politician or bearded ayatollah on the news denouncing something or other. Plus except for Tajikistan it uses the Perso-Arab script, so a lot of people mistake it for some sort of variety of Arabic when it's really an Indo-European language, which can easily be seen in cognates with English like pedar (father), barâdar (brother), bad (bad), nist (not, think German nicht), ast (is), mordan (to die, think mortality), and tons of others. This video is just a few minutes of Deutsche Welle's Persian news service with all the other voices cut out, except for that part closer to the end where she is conducting a phone interview and it would sound strange to just hear her asking herself question after question. I still cut out most of the answers though as they're pretty long, so it still sounds a bit like she's really peppering the guy with questions but the real interview wasn't like that of course.



The image in the video is Tehran in the winter.

If you want to see what daily life in Iran is like (as of 2007) see former BBC journalist Rageh Omaar's Rageh Inside Iran. The Globe and Mail also had an article a while back on the island of Kish where restrictions aren't as tight as on the mainland.