Indonesian personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

The first Indonesian sentence I understood without help was a caption under a photograph of a jungle cactus: "daun ini tumbuh lebih cepat di musim hujan". I had been growing houseplants for about three years and had drifted onto Indonesian growers' forums looking for advice, because so much of what I wanted to know came from people in Java and Sumatra rather than from British catalogues. At first I pasted everything into a translation tool. Gradually I noticed patterns instead: the same prefixes attached to words I already recognised, tumbuh and menumbuhkan sitting side by side, plurals made by saying the word twice. Working out that grammar for myself was more absorbing than the plants.

Reading pushed me further. I borrowed Pramoedya Ananta Toer's This Earth of Mankind from the library and was struck by how much of the novel turns on which language a character is permitted to speak, and to whom. That made me want to understand how Indonesian came to be a national language chosen rather than inherited, spoken alongside hundreds of regional languages. My French A level has given me a taste for looking closely at how a language organises meaning, but French also came with a ready-made shelf of school resources. I want to study a language where I will have to build my own route in, and where the literature, history and politics I read will be genuinely unfamiliar rather than a slight variation on things I already know. Studying Indonesian at degree level, with time spent in the country, is the only way I can move from guessing at forum posts to reading, listening and arguing properly in the language.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I am taking French, History and Geography at A level, and I chose the combination deliberately rather than by elimination. French has trained me to analyse structure: translating unseen passages taught me to work out what a sentence is doing before deciding what it means, which is exactly the habit I use when I pick apart an Indonesian caption. Oral exam preparation has also made me comfortable speaking a language badly in public, which I think matters more than accuracy at the start.

History is where I have learned to handle sources that disagree. A coursework unit on decolonisation in the twentieth century let me read about independence movements outside Europe, and although Indonesia was not my set topic, it shaped the questions I now ask: how new states decide what holds them together, and what role a shared language plays in that. Geography has been useful in a more practical way. Studying monsoon systems, volcanic soils and rapid urbanisation gave me a physical picture of the archipelago, so when I read about Jakarta sinking or about smallholder agriculture I have something to attach the vocabulary to.

Alongside my subjects I have worked through a beginners' Indonesian book and free university materials online, spending about three hours a week on them. I keep a notebook of affixes with examples I have actually met, rather than lists I have copied out, and I write short diary entries in Indonesian most weeks. They are simple and no doubt full of errors, but rereading January's entries next to November's shows me how much can be built from consistent, unsupervised work.

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

For two years I have read with my younger brother, who is dyslexic, for twenty minutes most evenings. We decode unfamiliar words together, look for chunks he recognises, and go back over sentences when meaning slips. Doing this has changed how I approach my own language learning: I have become far more patient with slow, repeated practice, and much more aware that fluent reading is a set of separate skills rather than one talent. It has also made me notice how odd English spelling is compared with the regular, predictable Indonesian orthography I am learning.

On Saturdays I work in the plant section of a garden centre, advising customers, watering and checking stock. The job involves explaining the same care instructions to very different people, including customers whose English is limited, and I have learned to simplify without sounding impatient. It is also where my plant interest turned into something steadier: I now grow and propagate around thirty plants at home, several of them species native to Indonesia, and I follow two Indonesian nursery accounts whose videos I use as listening practice. I understand perhaps a third of what is said, which is enough to keep going back.

At college I help run a weekly language exchange table in the common room, where students practise whichever languages they are learning over lunch. Two members speak Malay at home, and comparing words with them has been the closest I have come to conversation in something like Indonesian, as well as a good lesson in how false friends trip you up. I also play badminton in a local club league, which is partly how I first noticed how much Indonesian sporting and media commentary exists online, and gave me another reason to keep listening.

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