Urdu personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

I grew up hearing Urdu spoken around me and speaking it badly. I could ask for more rice, argue about cricket and follow most of a phone call to Rawalpindi, but when my grandmother handed me a book of Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poems two years ago I could barely get through a line. The words I knew were hiding inside a script I could not read at speed. That gap between hearing a language and being able to read it properly is what pushed me towards studying Urdu formally rather than assuming I already had it. Since then I have worked through the Nasta'liq script with a beginner's workbook and a lot of squinting at joined letter forms, and I have started reading Faiz in the original alongside a facing English translation. What interests me is how much the translations have to decide on my behalf. A word like dil carries far more than heart, and the ghazal form, with its repeated rhyme and refrain, does work in Urdu that simply cannot be reproduced in English without losing either the sound or the sense. I want to study Urdu at degree level because I want to be the person making those decisions knowingly, with grammar and literary history behind me rather than guesswork. I am also drawn to the wider position of the language: its shared grammatical base with Hindi, its Persian and Arabic vocabulary, and the way its written form carries a particular literary and religious history. A degree that combines rigorous language teaching with literature, film and history would let me move from a household speaker with gaps to someone who can read a nineteenth-century prose text, a Pakistani newspaper editorial and a film script, and explain how each is doing its job.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A levels have given me the habits I will need. History has been the most useful preparation, because it has trained me to read sources carefully and to be sceptical about how they were produced. Studying the British Empire meant looking at official correspondence and asking whose language and whose categories were being used, which is directly relevant to reading about the standardisation of Urdu and Hindi in colonial India. English Literature has built up my ability to write about poetry closely, and the unit on poetic form has made me pay attention to metre and repetition in a way I now apply, clumsily, to ghazals. I chose Partition poetry for my Extended Project Qualification, comparing a small set of poems in English translation and looking at how translators handled imagery of trains, borders and homes. Researching it taught me how to use a library catalogue properly, how to narrow a question that was far too broad at the start, and how frustrating it is to depend entirely on translation. Geography contributes something less obvious but real: coursework on migration and urban change has given me statistical confidence and a sense of how populations and languages move together. Alongside school I have kept a vocabulary notebook of words I hear at home but have never seen written, and I check spellings against a dictionary rather than guessing, which has slowly improved my reading. I know that university language study will be far more demanding than self-teaching, with grammar drills and set texts and deadlines, and I am ready for that structure.

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

Most of my practical language use comes from home and from my Saturday job. I work in a hardware shop where a number of older customers prefer to speak Urdu or Punjabi, and I have become the person called over when someone is explaining what size of fitting they need. It has made me quicker at technical vocabulary and much less afraid of getting things wrong out loud. At home I read the news headlines aloud to my grandmother from a Pakistani website and we talk about them afterwards; she corrects my pronunciation and explains the idioms I stumble over, and in return I have started typing up a few of her favourite couplets so they are saved properly. It is slow work, because I still hunt for the right letter on the keyboard, but it has taught me more about spelling than any exercise book. I help my father with administration for a community cricket club, writing fixture notices, chasing subscriptions and occasionally translating a message into simple Urdu for parents who prefer it. Getting those notices clear and polite in both languages is harder than it sounds and I have learned to ask someone to check them. I also play in a local league myself, which has taught me to keep turning up in bad weather and to accept coaching. Outside that, I read fairly widely in translation: I have enjoyed Saadat Hasan Manto's short stories, which are blunt and uncomfortable and nothing like the sentimental writing I expected. Between all of this I have built the two things I think matter most for this degree: steady practice over months rather than bursts of enthusiasm, and a genuine willingness to be corrected.

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