German University Application Skills and Experience

Hi! I applied for Italian and German, and Italian and Japanese as well. (Although my PS was about Italian and German because Japanese was a switch I made due to subject requirements!)

Here are a few things I did/mentioned:

1. I taught myself higher Italian when I was in 5th year (Scottish equivalent of year 12). In this section I discussed the fact that it was taking a risk to self-study a higher subject, but that I am an independent and confident worker who put in the effort to get an A. Obviously this is less common in England where you’ll do a-levels, but you could talk about taking an online course or doing some self study to prepare some German knowledge before uni

2. Volunteering in junior language classes. In 6th year we do an award called Caritas which involves doing 30 hours of volunteer work in the community, so I decided to help volunteer in junior language classes in my school. I helped out in French classes and a nat5 Spanish class.
It would be good to talk to teachers at school if there’s availability for you to do this. I’m not sure how the English timetabling system works at school and if you get things like study/free periods.

3. I don’t think work experience is super necessary for a language degree application unless it’s readily available to you. It is best to focus on your studies. However, one of the greatest things to mention in your PS is why you’re passionate about learning that language! In general, I spoke about how languages are what help us to connect to and communicate with other people, and without knowledge of languages the world would be a less interesting place because our cultures wouldn’t be as evolved without language.
For Italian I spoke about my interest in Roman mythology, and then touched on the fact I travelled through a few places in Italy with my family to discover different parts of Italian culture which I loved.
For German I didn’t have too much because it would have been my beginners language, but I mentioned an interest in German politics due to researching Angela Merkel and her gov’t for my adv mods dissertation.

There’s so many things you can mention in an application for a language degree. Feel free to ask more questions and I’ll try my best to answer.