I take my spelling cues from my Persian-authored cookbooks and my husband and his friends.

I've never learned to speak the language beyond a few phrases. For example, a couple of the phrases I used in a lullabyes for my son. One set of phrases was "dooset daram" and "pishy jon" and another phrase was "Kheili mamnoon, kheli mamnoon, shoma khodet hasteed."

My husband has a dead ear and cannot teach my son or I the language. And, it's not taught at any of the universities or community colleges near us.

By "dead ear" I mean that my husband has no talent for hearing what someone is trying to repeat in Farsi. I'll see a transliteration used by someone and say it to him and he has no clue. He gets it if he reads it most of the time. His friends helped me with the phrases for my lullabyes. I've picked up a few from Maz Jobrani's "Word of the Week" bit too.

One of these years, when I can justify the expense to myself, I want to get one of the aps to learn Farsi.