Phillip Yoo Studies Latin on the School Bus

Phillip Yoo built his own study file for Latin, a workaround for the fact that his school bus has no wifi, and he wasn't willing to let that cost him review time. It is a small, practical piece of improvisation, and it says as much about him as any medal does.

The medals exist too. In his first year of study, arriving with no prior acquaintance with the language, Phillip earned Gold at the Beginning level on this year's National Latin Exam and Gold at the National Latin Vocabulary Exam. He was inducted, this year as well, into the National Latin Honor Society, among the youngest students at Emerson Latin ever to be so honored.

That speed is easy enough to measure. Meeting once a week and working through the grammar-translation method, Phillip finished the entirety of Latin grammar, through advanced syntax, in a single year, a course of study that would ordinarily take three years of high school Latin meeting five days a week. He counts full memorization of the five noun declension patterns, a month of sustained, unglamorous work, as a genuine turning point, and found an unexpected second one in the exam's culture component: reading about the daily texture of Roman life and belief left him, by his own account, simply curious about Roman history for its own sake. He can now read short Latin paragraphs comfortably and translate with little help, a considerable distance from the standing start of a year ago.

Outside Latin, Phillip, an eighth grader at Singapore American School, was admitted to Stanford's Pre-Collegiate Studies summer program and reached the semifinals of the Worlds Individual Debating and Public Speaking Championships as a delegate of Team Singapore. He plays competitive volleyball and drums, and draws in whatever time is left over. His teachers describe him as hard working and constantly curious to learn more, a description his own account of the school bus study file does little to dispute.

Latin, he says, taught him to take a difficult problem and break it into smaller pieces before solving it, a habit that has already outlasted the grammar it came from. He calls the language itself a gateway to two millennia of ancient history, philosophy, and classical literature, one he means to keep using wherever his studies take him next.