In the month after Angela Merkel announced that refugees were welcome in Germany, the number of people in Germany using arabicreadingcourse.com shot up. No other European country shows a spike like this one.
And it’s not just the Arabic Reading Course website that shows an increase in Germans wanting to learn Arabic, Google data shows the same pattern.
The graphs below are from Google Trends and show massive increases in searches for ‘Arabisch’ and ‘Arabisch lernen’ (German for ‘Arabic’ and ‘learn Arabic’).
This seems clear evidence that Germans were keen to start learning Arabic to understand and talk to Syrian refugees.
Good work, Germans! It’s great to see not just your willingness to welcome refugees to your country but also your enthusiasm for learning a new language to enable you to speak to them.
If you’re German and you’ve recently started learning Arabic for this reason, get in touch on arabic.reading.course@gmail.com, I’d love to hear from you.