Joonwoo Back Learned Latin the Way He Learned to Ride

Joonwoo Back has spent a long time around horses, and he describes the sport in a way that turns out to explain most of what has happened in his Latin study too: a move you could do easily last week is not always easy today, and the only real answer is patience with the fact that nothing gets perfected in a single sitting.

He arrived at Emerson Latin with no prior acquaintance with the language. A little more than a year later, he holds a Gold Medal in the National Latin Vocabulary Exam at the Intermediate level, a Gold Medal in the National Latin Exam at the Intermediate level with a score of 38 out of 40, a Silver Medal in a Latin etymology competition, and a place in the playoffs of his high school's Latin varsity league. This year, induction into the National Latin Honor Society.

The turn came when he stopped relying on memorized declension charts and started translating real passages instead, parsing each word for its actual grammatical work rather than reciting the rule it came from. Charts, he found, tell you the shape of the language; only the sentences themselves teach you to use it.

Latin has proven useful beyond its own borders. He credits it with making SAT vocabulary more approachable, and with easing his study of French, a language that shares enough of Latin's structure to reward the overlap; he holds the French DELF B2 certificate besides. At the American School of Kuwait he has served on Student Council in every grade since ninth, most recently as promotions manager, and risen from secretary to Vice President of the Math Honor Society. The United Nations in Kuwait selected him as a Young Ambassador and placed him with the Kuwait Red Crescent Society. He sings in his school's varsity choir and keeps a few art pieces in progress on the side.

Latin sits alongside a parallel project: workshops at Iowa and Kenyon, an invitation from Polyphony Lit to edit literary pieces translated from Arabic, and a scholarship that made him a Junior Editor there. He is now building his own journal, meant to give Arab youth a platform for their own voices at an unsettled moment for the region. Latin, he says, is a language that transmits wisdom about humanity and life. It is the same instinct, one suspects, that sent him looking for a way to pass that wisdom on. Asked what he would tell a hesitant prospective student, he did not embellish. Enroll.