Vaahaka Language Institute English, Dhivehi and Arabic in twelve week courses, in Hulhumalé

Dhivehi for newcomers

Ten weeks of the language you need to live here, not to read poetry in.

Ask for a booking

Send us a request and we will confirm it. Nothing is paid online.

What it costs

⃂ 1,650.00 Per person

Nothing is paid on this website. You reserve a place on an intake and the office confirms it, usually within a day, with the level the placement test put you in written on the confirmation.

The course fee is paid by bank transfer to the account in that email, or in cash at the office outside the closed hours between noon and four. A receipt with your enrolment reference on it comes back once the money has arrived, and a place is held for five days from the confirmation.

A course may be paid in two halves, the second before week six. Employers paying for staff should ask the office for an invoice addressed to the company before the intake starts rather than after, because a receipt made out to a student is not something a finance department will accept later.

The placement test is free and there is nothing to pay for it whether or not you go on to enrol.

Four hours a week for ten weeks, twelve to a class, for people who have moved here to work and are tired of pointing at things. Taught mostly in English with the Dhivehi built up around situations rather than around grammar tables.

What the ten weeks cover: greetings and the courtesies that matter more here than people expect, numbers and money, buying food and asking what something is, giving an address to a taxi, the words a clinic and a pharmacy use, what your landlord will say to you, and enough reading of the script to find the right shop and the right ferry.

What it does not cover is written Dhivehi at any length, or the formal register. Those are a second course and most people never want them. Being able to say the twenty sentences you actually need, in a way that a shopkeeper understands the first time, is what this course is for.

The teacher is Maldivian and has taught this course thirty one times. She will tell you in week one that your pronunciation is the whole battle and she is right.

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