Turkish personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

I first heard Turkish properly through a radio. Restoring old valve sets is a hobby I picked up from my grandfather's toolbox, and one of the pleasures of a working shortwave receiver is drifting across stations at night. Turkish kept catching my ear because it sounded so regular: long runs of suffixes, vowels that seemed to agree with one another, and sentences that ended where I expected the verb to begin. When I looked into why, I found agglutination and vowel harmony described in an introductory grammar I borrowed from the library, and the tidiness of the system genuinely delighted me. I had been reading translated literature for a couple of years by then, mostly because my English teacher suggested I widen my range beyond the syllabus. Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, a memoir of the city and of his own childhood, made me curious about how much of a writer's voice survives translation, and Latife Tekin's Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills showed me a register I had no way of judging in the original. That gap is what I want to close. I am drawn to a degree in Turkish because it combines something I find intellectually satisfying, the structure of a language quite unlike the ones I have studied, with access to a literature, press and history I can currently only meet second hand. Studying History has taught me how much depends on being able to read sources for yourself; Ottoman and modern Turkish archives are an obvious case where language is the door. I am realistic that fluency takes years of dull, necessary work on morphology and vocabulary, and I am prepared for that. What I want from four years is the ability to read a novel, follow a news broadcast, and hold a conversation that is not about the weather.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A-levels have prepared me in ways I did not plan. History has been the most directly useful: my coursework on the Gallipoli campaign required me to compare British official accounts with material written from the Ottoman side, and even in translation it was clear that names, places and chronology shifted depending on who was writing. I learned to be careful about sources that had passed through more than one language before reaching me. English Literature has trained me to read closely and to argue about why a particular word choice matters, which is the habit I want to bring to Turkish texts once I can manage them. Geography has given me a working knowledge of migration, urban growth and regional politics, and my case study on rapid urbanisation gave useful background to the squatter settlements Tekin writes about. Alongside my subjects I have been teaching myself the basics of Turkish for about fourteen months, using a course book, flashcards on my phone and a weekly hour with recorded dialogues. I can introduce myself, describe my family, ask directions and read simple news headlines with a dictionary. I have worked slowly through the case endings and I am still untangling the difference between the two past tenses, which I find one of the most interesting things about the language. I also studied GCSE French and Spanish, and although neither is close to Turkish, they taught me that progress comes from small daily contact rather than long weekend sessions.

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

On Saturdays I work in the outdoor plants section of a garden centre, which involves a lot of watering, restocking and explaining to customers why their lavender has died. It has made me much better at listening to someone describe a problem imprecisely and working out what they actually need, which I imagine is half of any conversation in a language you are still learning. I volunteer once a week at my local community library, mostly shelving and running the children's reading hour, and I have used the interlibrary request system enough to be comfortable tracking down material that is not on the shelf. At home I have spent a lot of time helping my grandmother use a tablet to video-call her cousins. Setting up captions, working out why the microphone had muted itself, and writing her a numbered list of instructions in large print taught me patience and the value of explaining one step at a time. Those calls also gave me my first sustained experience of sitting in a room where a conversation is happening that I only partly understand, and of picking up greetings and set phrases by repetition rather than study. My radio hobby continues to be useful practice: I keep a notebook of Turkish words I catch from broadcasts and look them up afterwards, which has built a slightly odd vocabulary heavy on traffic, football and weather. I am also the person my friends ask to organise things, and I ran the sign-up rota for our college's charity book sale, which involved chasing thirty people politely by message. I am used to steady commitments alongside study and I expect to keep that balance at university.

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