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Thomas Keen - Finnish and Russian BA
“SSEES offers a huge range of languages including some very uncommon ones which cannot be studied anywhere else in the UK. That was what made me first start thinking about applying here, but SSEES is much more than just niche courses for people who are interested in rarer languages like Finnish or Czech. It’s a place to learn from native speakers who have taken years studying how their own languages work, until they know the answer to every “why is this sentence like this”, and it’s a place where I got from knowing next to nothing of a language to conversational standard in a year.
Language learning is always a long term project, but at SSEES I’ve progressed so quickly in both my languages and it’s amazing to look back at how fast I’ve got to where I am. At the end of the first year of both of my language courses, we were given the opportunity to spend a long duration in the relevant country. I spent a month in Kazan, where I lived with a Russian woman who didn’t speak English, took courses in Russian and ate Russian food. Of course exposure to the language and culture is important, and that’s why all the language degrees I looked at included a compulsory year abroad, but to have this additional “mini year abroad” so early in the degree really gets your feet on the ground with speaking and understanding. It also prepares you for the year abroad, and having this prior experience really made setting off to live in a different country much less daunting.
The exciting thing about SSEES is that it’s not just a language department - it’s a multidisciplinary school, where research and study happens in History, Politics, Economics, Sociology, Business, and Literature, as well as a host of other disciplines that can be explored. At SSEES I have not just learned to speak Russian and Finnish, because I am also quickly becoming an expert in all things related to those languages, people and nations. SSEES puts the languages in the context of their countries, and then puts those countries in the context of their region. Just to give examples of what I chose to explore from Finnish, I’ve developed a much deeper understanding of Finland by also studying Swedish and other Nordic culture as well as a course on Estonia during my year abroad. SSEES has taught me not to see Finland and Russia as isolated nations with their own individual histories and cultures, and instead to understand how those histories and cultures intertwine with those of the Nordics, of eastern Europe, and of each other.