Hungarian personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

My interest in Hungarian began with a shelf of old phrasebooks that came to our house when my grandmother's neighbour moved into sheltered housing. Most were for holiday Spanish or German, but one thin Hungarian book had pencil notes in the margins and a case table that made no sense to me at all. I copied the table out to see whether it would become clearer, and instead found myself reading about agglutination, vowel harmony and why Hungarian sits apart from the Indo-European languages around it. Two years later I am still working through it, more slowly and more carefully than I expected. What draws me to studying Hungarian formally is the pleasure of a language that makes me rebuild my assumptions. In French, which I take at A-level, I can often guess my way towards meaning; in Hungarian I have to attend to suffixes and word order to understand who is doing what to whom. Learning that az apámnak carries information that English spreads across several small words changed how I think about grammar generally, and made my French essays more precise. I also want the literature and history that a degree brings: I have read Magda Szabo's The Door in English translation and was struck by how much of the novel is withheld rather than stated, which made me curious about how the original handles voice. Studying the language alongside the culture, rather than as a set of exercises, is what I am looking for, and a year abroad would let me test what I have learned in a place where I will be the one struggling to keep up.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A-levels are French, History and English Literature, and each contributes something to this application. French has given me the habit of working with a language every day rather than in bursts, and the confidence to speak while still making mistakes. Our oral preparation involves defending a position under time pressure, which I found difficult at first and now enjoy, and the translation work has taught me that a literal rendering is often the least accurate one. History has been valuable in a less obvious way. Studying interwar Europe gave me context for Hungary's borders, treaties and shifting alliances, and my coursework on nationalism and language policy meant reading about how states have promoted or suppressed particular languages. That has shaped how I think about Hungarian as a minority language in neighbouring countries, not just as the language of one state. English Literature has trained me in close reading, which is the skill I expect to use most in a language degree. Working on unseen poetry taught me to notice word choice and syntax before reaching for an interpretation, and I have tried to apply the same patience to the short Hungarian folk tales I read with a dictionary beside me. Alongside my timetabled subjects I have worked through a beginners' Hungarian course book and a set of online audio lessons, keeping a notebook of verb prefixes and set phrases. Progress has been uneven, and I am realistic that I am still a beginner who reads more easily than I speak, but I can hold a simple conversation about my family, my studies and the weather, and I can read signs, menus and headlines with reasonable accuracy.

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

Most of my independent study has been solitary, so I was glad to join a language-swap table that another student set up in our college common room at lunchtime. My contribution was organisational rather than heroic: I made a weekly sign-up sheet, matched people by language and level, and put together a one-page list of conversation prompts so pairs did not run out of things to say after five minutes. It ran for two terms and usually drew eight or nine people. Through it I practised French with a student from Lille and, more importantly for me, I met a member of staff whose family is Hungarian and who agreed to spend twenty minutes a fortnight talking with me. Those sessions showed me how much politeness and register I had missed by learning from a book. On Saturdays and through the summer I work at a garden centre, mostly on the tills and watering the outdoor stock. It is ordinary work, but it has taught me to be useful in a busy hour and to explain things clearly to customers who are unsure what they need, which is not far from the patience required in a conversation class. I also sing with a community choir my mother belongs to; we learned a Kodaly setting last year, and being handed a text with unfamiliar stress patterns was a good reminder that pronunciation is physical as much as intellectual. In my own time I have been building a small card set of Hungarian verbs, grouped by prefix rather than alphabetically, because I found dictionaries unhelpful for spotting patterns. It is unfinished and slightly chaotic, but making it has taught me more than any app, and I would like to keep working in that way alongside proper teaching.

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