Romanian personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

I came to Romanian sideways, through a library shelf and a fiddle. Two years ago I borrowed a translation of Mihail Sebastian's journal because the cover caught my eye, and I was struck by how a language I had never heard spoken could carry a world that felt both close to and unlike anything I had read in French or English. Since then I have worked through other Romanian writing in translation, including Norman Manea's essays and some of Blaga's poems in bilingual editions, where having the Romanian text on the facing page started to teach me things: the definite article attached to the end of the noun, the way case endings survive where French has lost them, the layers of Slavic and Turkish vocabulary sitting beside words I could guess from Latin. That mixture is what pulls me. Romanian is the Romance language that took a different road, and studying it means studying contact, borrowing and the history of a region rather than a tidy family tree. I want to read Caragiale's comedies and interwar journalism in the original, and to understand the arguments about language, identity and nation that ran through the nineteenth century and are still audible now. I chose a single-language degree rather than adding Romanian to something safer because I want the grammar, the literature and the history of the region taken seriously together, and because the year abroad is the part I am most looking forward to. Beyond the degree I am drawn to translation and to documentation work in archives or broadcasting, where a less commonly taught language is genuinely useful rather than decorative.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A levels have given me the habits I will need. French has been the most direct preparation: four years of grammar drilling means I can talk about aspect, subjunctives and pronoun order without flinching, and translating unseen passages has taught me to work out structure before reaching for a dictionary. I have found that useful when picking apart Romanian sentences, and also humbling, because my instinct to read Romanian as if it were Italian is usually wrong. History has been where I learned to handle sources that disagree; my coursework on propaganda in interwar Europe involved reading translated speeches and press extracts, and it made me careful about what survives translation and what quietly does not. English Literature trained me to read closely and to write about form rather than plot, which I used in an essay comparing two English versions of the same Blaga poem, looking at how each translator handled line breaks and the repetition that holds the poem together. Alongside lessons I have taught myself Romanian from a course book and a free online grammar, working most evenings for about forty minutes. I can introduce myself, describe my family, manage present and past tenses and read simple news headlines with a dictionary, though my pronunciation of the vowel written with a circumflex still needs a native ear. I keep a notebook of false friends and of words I meet in reading, and I test myself with flashcards on the bus. I know this is a beginner's foundation rather than fluency, and that is exactly why I want structured teaching.

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

Every Thursday I visit my grandmother, who has arthritis in her hands, to help with letters, online shopping and the forms that arrive from the council. Reading official English aloud to someone who finds the wording baffling has made me think hard about clarity and about how much meaning sits in the phrasing rather than the vocabulary, which feels relevant to translation. Her neighbour, Doina, often comes round, and over the past year she has let me try my few sentences of Romanian on her. She corrects me patiently, laughs at my stress patterns, and has explained things no textbook told me, such as which forms sound stiff and which sound normal at a kitchen table. That is the most valuable practice I have had. My other route in is music. I play fiddle with a community folk group, and learning Romanian and Moldovan dance tunes from recordings taught me to listen to ornamentation and irregular rhythm before I understood a word of the language; I have since started matching song lyrics to the transcriptions I can find, which has quietly built my vocabulary. At sixth form I help run a language exchange lunch club, where students teach each other short lessons in their home languages; I have organised the rota and taught two sessions on French verb patterns, and I have learned as much from listening to others explain Polish and Punjabi. Saturday work in a garden centre has taught me to be useful when it is busy, to serve customers politely when I do not know the answer, and to turn up reliably at eight in the morning, which I expect a demanding degree will also require.

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