Arabic personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

The first Arabic I learned to read was a shop sign in Birmingham that I passed every week on the bus to my grandmother's. It took me three months of working through an alphabet course to realise it said nothing more exciting than the family name of the owners, but by then I was hooked on the mechanics of it: the way letters change shape according to their neighbours, the way a root of three consonants can be stretched into a whole family of related words. Coming from French, where I had grown used to the comfort of recognisable vocabulary, this was a genuinely different kind of thinking, and I found I enjoyed being a beginner again. What keeps me interested now is less the novelty and more the reach of the language. My History A-level covers the Crusades, and reading about the period made me aware how much of the narrative I was given came through European sources; I would like to be able to approach material in Arabic myself rather than always through a translator's choices. I am also drawn to the situation of dialect and Modern Standard Arabic together, which my conversation group discusses constantly, since our volunteer tutor is Sudanese and two of the regulars are Lebanese and disagree cheerfully with him about everything. A degree course attracts me because it offers the grammatical foundation I cannot build alone, alongside the literature, history and linguistics that give the language somewhere to go. The year abroad is the part I think about most: I want the experience of ordinary life conducted entirely in a language I have only ever used in a church hall on Saturday mornings.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

French A-level has given me the habit of working accurately with grammar rather than guessing, and my teacher's insistence on translating both ways has been useful preparation for the kind of close attention Arabic demands. I have found that my French essay work, where I write about Francophone North Africa, links directly to my wider interests: studying immigration to France sent me looking for more on Algeria specifically, and I read Assia Djebar's Fantasia in translation, which made me curious about how much of her argument about language and silence depends on the interplay between French and Arabic. History has trained me to weigh sources against one another and to write to a deadline, and my coursework on the reliability of contemporary chronicles taught me to ask who a text was written for. English Literature contributes the analytical vocabulary I use for poetry, and I am aware that Arabic poetic form works on principles I have not yet met, which is part of the appeal. Outside my timetabled subjects, I worked through an introductory Arabic textbook over the past eighteen months, roughly four evenings a week, covering the script, present and past tense verbs and basic case endings. I keep a vocabulary notebook organised by root rather than alphabetically, which was slow to set up but has made new words much easier to remember. I have also read an introductory book on Arabic linguistics from the library, which explained diglossia in a way that finally made sense of my tutor's habit of switching registers mid-sentence.

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

My independent project grew out of my vocabulary notebook. I began collecting English words with Arabic origins, then narrowed it to terms used in mathematics and astronomy, and wrote a twelve-page piece tracing a small set of them through Spanish and Latin into English. Checking etymologies properly was harder than I expected, since popular websites often contradicted the dictionaries, and I learned to record where each claim came from and to leave a question mark where I could not confirm it. I presented a shortened version to my school's language club, which I help run on Thursday lunchtimes, teaching the alphabet to about eight students who wanted to try something outside the curriculum. Preparing those sessions forced me to understand the writing system far better than learning it had. My Saturday conversation group has been the most useful thing I do. I am the least fluent person there by a long way, which means most of my contribution is listening, asking for repetitions and reading aloud badly while people correct me kindly. I have learned to tolerate not understanding, which I think will matter more abroad than any vocabulary list. I also help set out chairs and make tea, which is how I ended up in most of my longest conversations. I work Saturdays and some Sundays at a garden centre, on tills and restocking. It has taught me to stay pleasant when a queue is building and to explain things clearly to customers who know less about plants than they think, and it funds my books. Balancing sixteen hours of work with A-levels and my own study has made me organised out of necessity; I plan my week on Sunday evenings and protect the evenings I have set aside for Arabic. I am realistic that a degree in Arabic means years of steady, unglamorous accumulation, and that is a prospect I find genuinely appealing rather than daunting.

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