Cambridge MML Interview: Commenting on an Unseen Text

Owen · Modern and Medieval Languages (Cambridge)

Hi, I'm Owen, a graduate of Girton College at the University of Cambridge, where I studied Modern and Medieval Languages and Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. In this post I want to run through a question type that comes up often in MML interviews, and which is also used for subjects like linguistics and classics: being asked to comment on an unseen text in a language you do not know.

This was my own very first experience of interviews at Cambridge. I walked into my interviewer's room, was handed a poem in an unfamiliar African language as I sat down, and was asked to talk about it for half an hour. It can be a genuinely challenging question, but with some thought and preparation it becomes much less daunting, and it can even be enjoyable.

What the question is really testing

The most important thing to understand is that you are not expected to know the answer. The purpose of the interview is to see how you break down unfamiliar material and work through a new, complex problem under a little pressure, which is exactly what you will be doing in your supervisions and tutorials throughout your degree. Oxbridge can teach you facts and data very effectively. What is harder to teach is how to think, so this is what the interview is designed to explore.

Sometimes you will be given the text a few minutes in advance, and sometimes you will be handed it in the room and asked to comment after only a minute or two of reading. Your interviewer might ask specific questions, such as where or when the text might be from, or what you can say about its grammar, or they might simply ask you to lead the conversation yourself.

How I would approach the text, step by step

I always encourage students to start with the basics and build up. Laying simple groundwork first gives you a foundation before you move on to the more complex features later.

My very first observation would be that we have a written text at all, which already tells us we are dealing with a literate society whose language gets written down, and that narrows the possible times and places. I would then note things that seem obvious but are still useful, such as that the text uses an alphabetic script rather than a logographic one like Chinese, and that many characters resemble the Latin alphabet, which might suggest a shared origin. I would notice that the text is set out in lines, so it could be a poem, a song or a list, and that it uses familiar punctuation and spaces between words, which not every language does.

Throughout all of this, remember that your interviewers are clever but they are not mind readers, so it is important to vocalise your thinking. Talk them through every step so they can follow your reasoning and so none of your observations get missed, even the simple ones.

Once the groundwork is laid, you can look at individual elements in more detail. It is more impressive if you lead this yourself rather than waiting to be prompted, because it shows independence and makes you an interesting person to talk to. I would pick out one or two elements that feel familiar and one or two that feel unfamiliar, drawing on my own background, because the more specific your observations are, the more they stand out. If you speak Greek, you might comment on the shapes of certain characters. If you speak German, you might spot words that look similar to ones you know. Even as an English speaker, small particles like "in", "need" or "amen" can be recognisable.

From there you can move into the grammar. Use repeated elements in the text to guess at word classes, so what might be a noun, a verb or a pronoun, and think about whether the language uses suffixes, prefixes or particles, and where. Even without technical terminology, engaging with curiosity brings useful insight. A good final step is to use your analysis to make an educated guess about where and when the language might be spoken and which other languages it might be related to.

The mindset that matters

If this feels daunting, it is meant to. Interviews are about the journey, not the destination. If you engage proactively and with curiosity, talk your interviewer through your thought process, and use what you already know as a base for text-specific comments, you will leave a strong impression of your intellectual engagement and your passion for the subject. One last piece of advice: interviewers are not only looking for good students, but for people they would enjoy teaching, so do try to have fun in your interview too.