Bangalore

Rajwardhan Kumar was really there on time, early in the morning shortly after seven, but he still only drew number 85. It didn’t even begin until 9:30: registrations for new German courses at the Goethe-Institut in Bangalore. For two days there was a rush as 250 prospective German students per day completed their registration forms.

Rajwardhan, a 25-year old computer expert, comes from Bihar where he worked for the city administration. Now he wants to get his Master’s degree in Germany. In the next few weeks he plans to apply to universities in Frankfurt, Rostock, and Wuppertal and for that, he needs to provide evidence of German skills. He hopes to acquire them in a crash course.

The Goethe-Institut is the key for Indians who wish to learn German. It is named here after the German Indologist Max Müller. There are courses every day: mornings and afternoons, Saturdays and Sundays, intensive courses and super-intensive courses, courses for beginners and advanced students, for children and adults, and even for German teachers. If the institute were open 24 hours a day, the people would probably even come at night. Twenty-three German teachers work here; most of them are Indian.

A three-and-a-half month course is not cheap; including books, library use, and the exam fee it costs 16,000 rupees or about 270 euros. But the German language aspirants are happy to spend this money, whether to find a good job, advance in their careers, or simply as a hobby. Of course many also dream of travelling to Germany someday. In 2011, 1,800 people learned German at Max Müller in Bangalore, most of them between the ages of 20 and 30 years young. Beginners’ courses are the most in demand and more than half of the students continue from there. “They often need the certificate for a visa. When a husband gets a job in Germany, his wife needs to complete at least the first level in order to join him,” explains course planner and German teacher Deepak Paranjape. The Indian people generally are multilingual, not a few of them speak five or six foreign languages. English is not considered a foreign language, but is the official administrative language because the nationals with their many regional languages could otherwise not understand one another.

In the upper storey of the institute an advanced class is presently preparing for exams. Dialogue exercises are on today’s curriculum. It’s already very fluid for Gauri Kalpoor. The 34-year old works for Lufthansa’s flight scheduling department and would like to become an executive. Shweta Singh (25) and Nimisha Vibin (29) are talking about what they do in their leisure time, what they spend their money on, what sports they like, and what they like to cook. The two women sit in German class for four hours every day; they later hope to work as translators.

Down the corridor, noise and laughter emanate from the classroom. Eleven to 14-year old girls and boys are spending their holidays at a German course and are presently naming a food or drink for every letter of the German alphabet, from A for Apfel, to N for Nuss, to V for Vanilleeis.

But, German is not only learned here on site. The institution also supports German lessons in schools in the PASCH (Partner Schools) project , which presently has three official partner schools in Bangalore, and the programme German in 1,000 Schools, which was especially launched for children of civil servants who learn at schools with insufficient funding.