Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

My history coursework asked us to choose a twentieth-century conflict outside the syllabus, and I picked the break-up of Yugoslavia because I knew almost nothing about it. Reading around it, I kept hitting the same problem: the sources disagreed not only about events but about words. Whether the language spoken in Sarajevo, Zagreb and Belgrade is one language or three turned out to be a question with political weight, not just a linguistic one. I found that far more interesting than I expected. Studying German has already shown me how much grammar carries meaning that English handles with word order or extra words, and I want to take that further with a language family I would otherwise never meet. The case system, the aspect pairs in verbs, and the fact that the same language is written in both Latin and Cyrillic scripts all appeal to me as puzzles, but the reason I want four years of it rather than an evening class is that I want to read and listen without a translator standing between me and the material. I am drawn to a course that combines intensive language work with history, literature and film, and I like that a year abroad is built in rather than optional. In the long run I am interested in work where the region is treated as a place with its own present, not only as a case study in other people's arguments, whether that is translation, journalism or research.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A-levels give me most of what I need to start. German is the obvious foundation: I am used to learning case endings, to being corrected out loud, and to the point in a term where grammar stops feeling like a table and starts feeling like a habit. My teacher runs a weekly session where we discuss a news article in German without notes, and I have gone from dreading it to volunteering first. History has taught me to read sources for their agenda, which matters in a region where the same decade is narrated very differently depending on who is writing. For my coursework I compared how two textbooks, one British and one translated extract, presented the same period, and I had to be honest in my conclusion about the limits of working from translation. English Literature has given me the vocabulary to talk about how a text works rather than only what it says, which I expect to need when I move on to fiction and poetry in a new language. Outside lessons I have been working through a beginners' course in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian online, roughly three evenings a week since last spring. I can manage introductions, shopping and simple past-tense sentences, I can read Cyrillic slowly, and I have learnt the difference between tidy exercise answers and understanding spoken speed. I also took an EPQ-style short research task on language standardisation, which pushed me to read Robert Greenberg's Language and Identity in the Balkans and to accept that the answer is contested rather than settled.

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

For two years I have worked Saturdays and Sundays in a garden centre café, taking orders, clearing tables and covering the till at the busiest hour. It has made me quick at reading people and unembarrassed about asking someone to repeat themselves, which is a genuinely useful skill for a language learner. A regular customer's husband is from Tuzla, and once she knew what I was studying she started bringing me the odd word and correcting my pronunciation of her surname, cheerfully and repeatedly. That was the first time the language existed for me as something spoken by someone standing in front of me rather than as audio files. At school I help run the debating club, mainly organising fixtures and timing speeches, and last year I reached the regional round of an inter-school competition as second speaker. Preparing for it taught me to build an argument quickly from limited evidence and to stay civil when I am losing, both of which I think transfer to seminar work. I also volunteer at a monthly film night at my local library, setting up chairs, running the projector and writing the short introductions we hand out. I suggested a Bosnian film with subtitles for one of our slots; twelve people came, which felt like a small win, and two of them stayed afterwards to argue about the ending. Between shifts, timetables and revision I have become organised out of necessity, and I am comfortable with the daily, unglamorous repetition that learning a hard language actually takes.

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