Asian Languages/Civilizations (Japanese), MA postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

At the ramen restaurant where I work three evenings a week, the menu describes our broth with a single word, kotteri, and every few nights a customer asks me what it means. 'Rich' is accurate but thin; 'heavy' sounds like a warning. I have settled on explaining that it is the opposite of assari, and that the contrast matters more than either word alone. That small, repeated task of finding where a Japanese term sits in its own system before reaching for an English one is the habit I want to develop properly through postgraduate study in Japanese language and civilisation.

I have just completed a BA in Japanese and Linguistics, including a year abroad studying at a university in Japan. My dissertation examined how English translations of manga from the 1960s and 1970s handled onomatopoeia and mimetic words. I compared a small sample of panels from three translated series, recording whether the translator replaced, glossed, retained or deleted each sound effect. Japanese distinguishes giongo, which imitate sounds, from gitaigo, which suggest states or manners with no sound at all, such as shiin for silence. I found that sound imitations were usually replaced with English equivalents, while state words were far more often deleted, which flattens the mood of a scene. My sample was too small to generalise, and I said so, but the project showed me that translation choices reveal assumptions about what a reader can tolerate, and that those assumptions change over time.

That interest in period has drawn me towards literature and cultural history as much as linguistics. Reading Natsume Soseki's Kokoro first in translation and later, slowly, in Japanese, I noticed how much of the novel's restraint rests on what Sensei withholds, and how the translation must decide whether to explain or preserve that reticence. I would like to study how writing of the Meiji and Taisho periods negotiated new vocabulary and new forms of the self, and whether the language of those texts can be read alongside the visual vocabulary of later popular media.

My reading proficiency is solid at an upper-intermediate level, and I keep it active by reading a short newspaper column most mornings and noting unfamiliar kanji in a spreadsheet I review on the bus. My weakest area is classical Japanese, of which I have studied only an introductory semester. I expect postgraduate study to demand more of it, and I have begun working through bungo grammar on my own so that I start on firmer ground.

Outside study, my responsibilities are ordinary but steady. Since my mother returned to full-time shift work, I collect my eleven-year-old brother from school on weekdays and sit with him over homework, which has taught me patience with explaining things a fourth way. I also tutor two GCSE French pupils online. Tutoring has sharpened my sense of when grammar explanations help and when a learner simply needs more examples, a distinction I suspect matters in teaching Japanese too, where I would welcome any opportunity to assist with language classes.

The restaurant job has been useful in a way I did not expect. Working beside a Japanese head chef, I have learned kitchen vocabulary no textbook covered and heard how politeness levels shift between the pass, the dining room and the staff break. I joined a local running club last year as a way to spend time away from screens, and on Sunday long runs I often rehearse vocabulary in my head.

I am applying for postgraduate study because my undergraduate work raised questions I can now frame but not yet answer. I want the training in research methods, historical context and advanced reading that will let me treat individual words like kotteri, or a missing shiin, as evidence of larger cultural choices.