Arabic language and literature personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

I can order coffee, argue with my aunt about football and understand most of what my grandmother says on the phone, but for years I could not read a newspaper headline without spelling it out letter by letter. That gap between the Arabic I grew up hearing and the Arabic that exists on the page is what pushed me towards this degree. Spoken dialect was given to me; the written language I have had to go and get, in evening classes above a community centre, with a grammar book and a lot of patience. I want to study Arabic formally because I have discovered that the harder the reading gets, the more interesting it becomes. Working slowly through a short piece by Ghassan Kanafani with a dictionary beside me was frustrating and then, suddenly, absorbing: the sentence structure itself seemed to be doing part of the work, holding things back in a way my English translation could not manage. I am interested in how a literary tradition that stretches from pre-Islamic poetry to contemporary novels handles a language with such a wide gulf between everyday speech and written form, and in what happens to writers who move between the two. A degree combining language and literature appeals to me because I do not want to choose. I would like to reach the point where I can read a classical text with the apparatus scholars use, and also read a modern novel for pleasure without translation standing between us.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

A level English Literature has given me the habits I rely on most: close reading, building an argument from textual detail, and accepting that a first interpretation is usually a rough draft. Studying Othello alongside a selection of Romantic poetry taught me how much depends on form, and I now notice myself asking the same questions of Arabic poems in translation, even when I cannot yet hear the metre properly. History has been valuable in a different way. A coursework unit on the British Mandate period meant reading primary sources in translation and thinking carefully about who produced them and why. I became aware of how much I was relying on an editor's choices, which sharpened my wish to read originals. Religious Studies has introduced me to Qur'anic material in translation and to debates about interpretation that carry over into literary study, particularly around authority and context. Alongside college, I have attended a weekly Modern Standard Arabic class since Year 12, working through a textbook with a volunteer teacher. We cover grammar systematically, and I keep a notebook of roots and patterns, which has made vocabulary feel less like memorising and more like recognising. I have also been teaching myself to type in Arabic so that I can annotate texts properly. My handwriting is still slow, but I can now read aloud from a graded reader at a reasonable pace, and I have started keeping short diary entries in Arabic, mostly about the weather and what I have cooked.

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

Most mornings I get my younger brother ready for school; he has additional needs and does better with a settled routine, so I handle breakfast and the walk in while my mother leaves early for work. It has made me organised out of necessity, and it has taught me something about language too. He responds to repetition and rhythm, and to the same phrases in the same order, which is roughly how I have learned Arabic grammar: patterns first, exceptions later. On Saturdays I help at a supplementary school where children aged six to nine learn Arabic letters. I lead a table of four, practising letter shapes and simple joining. Explaining why a letter changes form depending on its position forced me to understand the writing system far better than my own lessons had, and I have learned to spot when a child is copying shapes without hearing the sound. Two evenings a week I work on the tills at a garden centre, which has little to do with literature but has made me quicker at dealing with people and better at concentrating when I am tired. I read in the staffroom during breaks; recently that has been Naguib Mahfouz in English translation, and I have enjoyed comparing two different translations of the same passage where the library had both. Outside of this I play in a college badminton club and listen to a lot of Arabic music, which is how I first noticed that song lyrics often sit somewhere between dialect and formal register. That in-between space is exactly what I would like to understand properly, and I am ready for the reading it will take.

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