Jonghyun Seo Keeps His Diary in Latin

Jonghyun Seo keeps a diary. He has kept one for years now, written entirely in Latin, a habit he adopted after reading that the historian Arnold Toynbee did the same and deciding the practice was worth stealing. It is, by any reasonable measure, a strange thing for a teenager to do. It is also, if you think about it for more than a moment, exactly the kind of habit that explains everything else about him.

Jonghyun came to Emerson Latin three and a half years ago with some prior foundation in the language and has spent the years since building it into something considerably more than foundation. He now reads Latin literature comfortably with a dictionary at hand, not because he needs it often, but because he has trained himself never to trust that he does not. One of the moments he counts as a genuine breakthrough came not from a triumph but from a difficulty: encountering the phrase di dederint in Cicero's First Catilinarian and finding, to his own frustration, that he could not immediately place the form. He worked it out with a dictionary in hand, and what he actually learned was not the form itself but a more useful fact: that knowing the standard grammar is necessary and not sufficient, and that real fluency means being willing to go looking for the exception.

He has since gone looking for quite a lot. He has taught himself the grammar of Ancient Greek well enough to translate the opening of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics on his own initiative, no class required. He is currently working through Frazer's The Golden Bough for pleasure. He plays competitive chess. None of this was assigned.

Jonghyun sat the National Latin Exam at both the Intermediate and Advanced levels in successive years and scored Summa Cum Laude both times, including a perfect score at the Intermediate level, an achievement the Exam records under its own Latin name: Cum Honore Maximo Egregio. He also holds Gold Medals in the National Latin Vocabulary Exam and the National Classical Etymology Exam, ranking among the top five students worldwide on the former. He now studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, having been admitted as well to the University of Edinburgh, Durham University, University College London, the University of St Andrews, and Purdue, among others. He describes himself as a stubborn, individual thinker. The record, at every point, agrees with him.