Article by: Phia Anderson

Though Germany might not seem like the most obvious destination to learn Arabic, it’s where Hugh Morrison ended up, doing a 13-week intensive Arabic course with the Excellence Center in Europe. 

As a 25-year-old American who knows no German, his friends back in the States were surprised, if not confused, as to why he was leaving the diverse DC area – with plenty of Arabic classes of their own to offer – to come to Halle and learn here, especially as Germany is not an Arab country. 

But despite the surprise the destination has been, including to him, when he sat down with me in the Excellence Center to speak about his program, he made it clear from the get-go that he’d not only found a school here that meshed wonderfully with him as a student but also a community and confidence in speaking that even impresses the other participants. As we spoke, he told me at length about his program here, and by the end, it was abundantly clear how much his program has benefited him, changing his skills, direction, and mindset in life and moving forward. 

Choosing Arabic & the Excellence Center

Hugh, who grew up attending a Spanish immersion school from first to sixth grade, has always had his life intrinsically linked to learning languages. His passion and interest in them are obvious to anyone who gets the chance to speak with him about them. 

“I love languages probably an unhealthy amount,” he says. “I feel like they give you so many more opportunities to speak to people and learn.” 

It’s unsurprising, then, that Hugh has always had a goal of learning a third language at some point, but for a long time, he was unsure which language he wanted that to be. He found the answer, though, in a Spanish class in college, when his professor put a document on the board one day that was written in Arabic script. 

“He read everything on the board and he said, ‘What you’re seeing is Arabic script, but I’m reading Spanish because Arabic is a completely phonetic language.’ So whatever they had written, because he could read Arabic script and he knew the letters and he knew the sounds of the letters, when he said it, to us, it sounded like Spanish. And that blew my mind.”

After that, Hugh was hooked on Arabic. He graduated from Denison University in 2020 as COVID-19 began locking down the country, and spent isolation taking an online course in Arabic from Indiana University, where he was “eating, breathing, and sleeping Arabic.” 

He was eager to learn the language, but he also had life to deal with: choosing where to live, establishing his career as a recent graduate… It took four more years, until the summer of 2024, before he was able to pursue Arabic again. He started looking for classes and programs around Washington, DC, where he lives and where he figured he’d be able to find something close to him because of the abundance of diversity and Arabic speakers in the area. 

“But then one night, I was like, what if I just looked for things abroad? I went through a rabbit hole and found a website that offered a lot of different programs, but this was the highest-rated program.” 

Hugh was immediately interested and scoured the Excellence Center’s website for all the information he could. 

“I think I had 80% of my questions answered just by looking through the entire website, which to me was reassuring that it was a real place with real people, like, it was a real city. I’d never heard of Halle before.”

He was even more impressed with the center itself. 

“It seemed like a really well-structured place, and I was interested in it… It seems like I’m drawn to language schools because I feel like they’re different than regular schools where language is just a class– the whole atmosphere is you are there to learn that language, and you have other people with you who are so invested in learning languages. So it’s not a core curriculum, and language is just adjacent to it. The whole purpose of you being there is for language.”

The Excellence Center’s Arabic Program seemed like a perfect fit, so he applied, and spoke with Rafat Shantir, the director, to answer questions and be placed according to his Arabic level, and that was it– Hugh was ready to come to Halle – and soon he was off to Germany to learn Arabic.

Program & Class Structure

As part of the Excellence Center’s Summer Arabic Program, when Hugh arrived in Halle he joined a class with other students who were learning Arabic at the same level he was staring at, which he thoroughly enjoyed. 

“I prefer a class and I prefer a smaller class. I think one-on-one lessons can be fun with things that maybe I’m struggling with, but I feel like for the most part, the people who are in my class all run into the same questions, which has been very nice… I like to ask classmates before asking the teacher because I feel like that helps all of us learn together.”

And not only learn Arabic; during their lessons, there is important cultural and historical information about Arabic and Arab countries integrated into it, rounding out their education more fully. And they learn together a lot in this program– three hours of lessons a day, five days a week, with a bit of homework after each class. It makes the group very tight-knit and comfortable with each other, including with their teacher, Muaz Alabaid. 

“I really, really love him as a teacher,” Hugh says. “I feel like Muaz’s style of teaching is like a sandbox. He will give you a bunch of tools and he won’t tell you what he wants– he’ll give you a guideline. He says, like, go make a sandcastle and with the tools in the box, you just do something. And he’ll help you along the way and he encourages you, but even if you don’t get it completely right, it’s not like, no, that’s wrong. It’s more like as long as you are understood and you can express yourself then that’s correct.” 

In this way, Hugh finds the teaching and learning style of the class to be extremely encouraging. 

“I feel like, for a lot of students, when you feel like you’ve gotten something wrong, you just get more and more discouraged… But Muaz is like, ‘Don’t feel like you have to do this [perfectly]… Make mistakes. When you speak this language, speak loudly. Don’t whisper. Don’t be embarrassed… If you get it wrong, okay, cool. Then just go back to your drawing board and try it again…’ I really appreciate that.” 

Muaz also encourages them to use their Arabic in real-life situations, instead of just confining their learning to the classroom. 

“I really like how we are not just in the classroom to learn, like, there’s a big push to have us go outside and speak to people [and] practice with people who speak the language outside of a classroom setting. That’s one of my favorite things– that there’s the outside component to it.”

What He’s Gained

With all this practice, encouragement, and real-life interaction, even only halfway through his 13-week program, Hugh can already tell he’s gained so much. 

“I think I’ve become so much more confident in speaking. It’s funny to me because this is Germany and everyone speaks German. Sometimes I don’t wanna go to a German shop because I’m not comfortable speaking German, so I always look for the Arabic-speaking shops because I’m like, well, I’m so much more comfortable speaking Arabic. So yeah, I would say my confidence has skyrocketed.”

And he’s earned that newfound confidence– he can now hold conversations in Arabic and do things such as order, ask for help, and more, when he was only about to identify words, letters, sounds, and spells following his course with Indiana University in 2020. But this Arabic Program hasn’t just changed his current circumstances in mere language– it’s also affected his future. 

“I’ve wanted to move abroad for a while and I think I really was wanting to take this summer to give me that clarity of like, okay, do I want to live abroad or is that just something that felt right being in the US? But I feel like my body and my mind are so much more in sync here. So I think it’s solidified that I do want to do something abroad. I really, really want to work in a language school. I love the atmosphere of it. So I think a lot of things are becoming more clear to me about maybe not where I’ll end up specifically, but at least a direction to go in.”

In the end, this program with the Excellence Center ended up not merely being language instruction; it changed Hugh’s skills, his confidence, and even his plans for the future. Needless to say, he has no regrets about taking part in the Summer Arabic Program at the Excellence Center in Europe.