Abigail Kim's Map Between Languages

The breakthrough, for Abigail, was realizing Latin was not a closed subject but a map connecting languages she already spoke. The Latin subjunctive of purpose turned out to explain the Spanish subjunctive she had learned separately; the strict logic behind Latin's indirect statements turned out to underlie a looser version she had always taken for granted in English. Latin stopped being a set of rules to memorize and became, in her words, an avenue for language connections.

In her first year of study, arriving with no prior acquaintance with the language at fourteen, an eighth grader at North London Collegiate School Jeju, she earned a Gold Medal on the 2026 National Latin Exam and a Gold Medal on the 2026 National Latin Vocabulary Exam. She was inducted, this year as well, into the National Latin Honor Society, a nomination she calls a genuine honor. She has also been admitted to Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth program, in a course on creative nonfiction.

Her range outside Latin is considerable: an AIME qualifier, a Silver Medal at the UKMT Cambridge Mathematical Olympiad, a Distinction on the AMC10, and a High Commendation in the John Locke Essay Competition. At school, she has been recognized for Exemplary Conduct and Effort and earned a House Commendation, chairs the Maths and Arts Enterprise, serves as a House Vice Captain, sits on the Societies Executive Committee, and represents her school as both an English Ambassador and a Library Ambassador. Outside of all this, she volunteers on a biweekly basis teaching Korean and mathematics at a local orphanage, reads widely in philosophy, and competes as a volleyball player and runner.

The habit Latin sharpened, she says, is examining every structure in a sentence rather than trusting intuition alone, a discipline she reports has since spread well past the language that taught it to her.