Earlier this month, City Language School was proud to host an Arabic Culture & Language Exhibition for Non-Native Speakers at its campus in Dublin. From 12pm to 3pm, students and the public were invited to take part in an exhibition that focussed on the rich heritage and language of Saudi Arabia. City Language School has many students from Saudi Arabia who come to prepare for their CAE & FCE exams and we were delighted to facilitate the event.
Saudi Student Club in Ireland
We caught up with organiser Ashraf Mandourah who told us more about the day and the club that ran the event.
“Most Saudi students in Ireland are post-graduate students and we have a club called, The Saudi Student Club in Ireland. It’s responsible for students’ activities throughout Ireland,” says Ashraf. “We like to be proactive within the Irish community and we had an idea that we wanted to raise awareness about the Arabic language. So we invited people to come and learn about Arabic, how we write from right to left, the characters and so on.”
Ashraf says that the day itself was “unbelievable”.
“Everybody enjoyed it,” he says. “We had so much traffic from outside the centre, people were interested in the Arabic language beyond our expectations. They showed interest, they loved having their names written in Arabic and there was also the additional element of the Arabic food and coffee that was on offer; things from our culture that everyone enjoyed.”
Great Facilities
“The facilities are top notch,”continues Ashraf, “with the boards, the screens and the great space in the student room. Oscars hosts a weekly event with the Takamol Program another Saudi Cultural program for the kids of the students. So we already knew about the facilities how co-operative the staff are in there. It’s the best place if you want to show people things, make presentations and play multimedia and so on. There’s really no better place in the city centre. It was a great success and we’d love to do it again.”
