Welsh personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

Welsh was a timetabled subject for me long before it was a language I actually used. That changed the summer I started helping at a Welsh-medium play scheme run through our local menter iaith, where I spent six weeks trying to referee arguments about skipping ropes in a language I had only ever written essays in. I was slow, I got tenses wrong, and seven-year-olds corrected me cheerfully. But I came away with something my exercise books had not given me: the sense that Welsh belongs to ordinary situations, not just to comprehension exercises. I want to study it at degree level because I am no longer satisfied with using it competently. I want to understand how it works and where it came from. I find the structure genuinely interesting – the mutations that my classmates treated as arbitrary punishment turn out to follow patterns with long histories behind them, and learning why has made me better at using them. I am also drawn to the literature, which I have so far met only in fragments. Reading Kate Roberts's short stories with a dictionary beside me was slow going, but the restraint in her writing about small domestic disappointments stayed with me for weeks afterwards. Alongside that, I am curious about the language politically and socially: how a language survives without official support for generations, what revival actually involves, and why the census figures and the lived experience in my own town do not always seem to match. A degree that lets me improve my fluency while studying the literature, history and linguistics of the language is exactly what I want next.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A-levels give me the range I need. Welsh has built my written accuracy and pushed me into reading longer texts independently; I now read Welsh-language news online most mornings, partly as practice and partly because the coverage of local government is different from what I find in English. History has taught me to handle sources carefully and to notice who is absent from a record, which shaped my thinking when I looked at nineteenth-century material for my school project. English Literature has been the most useful for close reading: analysing poetry line by line has made me far more attentive to word choice and rhythm, and I have started trying to do the same with Welsh poems, even when I only half understand them on first reading. For a Welsh Baccalaureate individual project I researched the place names of the villages around my school, using old tithe maps in the county archive, a published dictionary of Welsh place names, and interviews with two long-standing residents. I found that several English spellings on road signs preserve pronunciations that have otherwise disappeared locally, and I had to be honest in my conclusions about which of my suggested etymologies were speculative. It taught me how much careful reading a small piece of research actually needs. Outside lessons I have worked through a grammar textbook chapter by chapter, keeping a notebook of idioms I hear rather than ones I am taught, which has improved my speaking more than anything else I have tried.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

For the past eighteen months I have worked weekend shifts in a garden centre café, mostly on the till and clearing tables. It sounds unrelated, but it is where I have done most of my speaking practice. A regular customer, a retired farmer from Llanarmon, realised I was learning and now insists on ordering entirely in Welsh, at speed and in dialect. At first I understood about half; now I can follow him and answer without rehearsing sentences in my head first. The job has also taught me to stay patient and clear when a queue is building and someone is unhappy about their order, which is a kind of composure I expect to need in a seminar as much as at work. I coach the under-11s at my netball club on Thursday evenings with another volunteer. Breaking a skill down for children who lose interest quickly has made me think about how explanation works, and I have started using simple Welsh instructions during warm-ups because several of the girls attend Welsh-medium primaries and enjoy being the experts for once. At school I helped set up a lunchtime Welsh conversation group after noticing that people who had passed their GCSE were losing confidence through disuse; six or seven of us meet fortnightly with a sixth-form teacher and talk about nothing in particular, which is the point. I was pleased to be awarded a departmental prize for contribution to Welsh last year. I read widely in English too, mostly history and crime fiction, and I am slowly working towards reading a full Welsh novel without stopping every paragraph.

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