Chaeyoon Lee Already Runs a Latin Account of Her Own

Long before this profile, Chaeyoon Lee had already built something like it herself: an Instagram account explaining English words through their Latin roots, card news style, aimed at an audience her own age. She started it in middle school for the plainest possible reason. She wanted her friends to find the language as interesting as she did.

She came to Emerson Latin by way of an afterschool class she signed up for almost on a whim, and has been here two years now, arriving already with some foundation in the language. This year she scored a perfect five on the AP Latin exam and holds a Gold Medal in the National Latin Vocabulary Exam. This year, induction into the National Latin Honor Society.

Her breakthrough came with the subjunctive, which had blurred for her into one generic translation regardless of which use was actually at work. She sat down and sketched the different functions side by side until she could see, rather than simply recall, how they diverged. Parsing sped up almost immediately afterward.

The study has paid dividends elsewhere. French, Spanish, and German all draw on Latin, and she has found each easier to pick up for having learned to recognize what they inherited. At Cheongshim International Academy she serves as a dormitory leader, deputy head of Round Square, editor in chief of the school's English newspaper, and deputy head of the school orchestra, where she also plays piano. She has collected Subject Excellence Awards in English, Social Studies, and Spanish, and keeps up Korean traditional dance and architectural drawing, some of it exhibited.

She has been reading Augustine's Confessiones, and recognized her own experience in his account of learning Greek under compulsion while absorbing Latin freely, out of curiosity alone. An interest in architecture has since given her something to chase beyond the grammar itself. She is tracing the word forum back toward its history and civic function, a thread she would like to pursue further. Latin, she says, taught her to think more slowly, and that, somehow, made her think more deeply. She wrote that herself. Asked what she would tell a student weighing whether to start, she said the slow beginning is worth it to anyone who likes seeing how something is built.