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The University of Southampton
HumanitiesPostgraduate study

Alma Rodriguez-Tsuda PhD Linguistics

Alma Rodriguez-Tsuda's Photo

Hi, I'm Alma Rodriguez-Tsuda and I studied PhD Linguistics within Humanities at the University of Southampton.

I’m definitely enjoying the work and appreciate all the support I get from the staff here, it’s very motivating.

Languages have always been very important in Alma’s life, so it is logical that her PhD thesis is an exploration of how people learn them.

Born in Mexico to a Spanish mother and Japanese father, Alma moved to Barcelona with her family when she was a child and set about the challenge of learning Catalan. She also knows basic Japanese and started studying English at school. She says: "It’s natural for me to learn languages and I enjoy the academic study of linguistics."

Her first degree in Mexico was in filology (a combination of linguistics and literary study). Alma moved to Southampton in 2001 where she started work and embarked on intensive language courses. She explains: "I was inspired to learn English as it’s the world’s lingua franca – and also in order to read James Joyce in the original language. But I arrived in the UK with only basic schoolgirl English so I knew I had to work hard." Alma then enrolled at Humanities to do a masters degree in linguistics which gave her the confidence to stay on for a PhD. "I’m definitely enjoying the work and appreciate all the support I get from the staff here, it’s very motivating," she says.

Alma is also an author of self-help books in Spanish. After completing her PhD, she would like to stay on in the UK to carry out post-doctoral research.

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