Based in Dubai, Qammaruddeen Najmuddeen is an expat of India enjoying a UAE Golden Visa and founder of an application designed specifically to enable Arab and non-Arab persons to study in Arabic in a way that is easy and useful. The genesis of his campaign was an “embarrassing experience he had in 2011 while visiting a Sharjah family court- he failed to understand the basics of Arabic”. This incident where a judge asked Najmuddeen about marriage and everybody in the court laughed due to misunderstanding of some Arabic words made him also vouch for mastery of Arabic and assisting other people to do so.
Najmuddeen had always wanted to speak Arabic like his father, who dealt with Arab clients, although he never did anything to make it possible as he had grown up in the UAE. In 2011 he decided to change this by using his shame for motivation that started though a Twitter account @GoArabic where he was teaching Arabs simple Arabic sayings. Instead of being made fun of, this forced him to develop a stronger idea, @WeSpeakArabic that was going to involve local curators providing content on a weekly basis. The platform, however, started to grow where in three years recorded over 60 curators, and 6200 followers.
It now contains more than 1 000 phrases which are aimed at informing colloquial Arabic, proper greetings for most circumstances being the starting phase. Realising that such approaches are not necessary for providing conversational skills that could be put to immediate use, Najmuddeen opted for conversational Arabic. His website letsgoarabic.com divides phrases according to such as greetings, time and fruits and these come with voice and picture assistances.
Today, Najmuddeen has expanded his platform and in the same year 2021, he got his UAE Golden Visa for Artistic Talent. He wants to make the website bigger and cover more regional Arabic dialects so that others can try to reach the level they want to be at.
