World Win For Latin!

Earlier this term, Language Perfect, a global language learning website developed by two Old Collegians, held its annual World Championship. The competition ran for 10 days with hundreds of schools from all over the world taking part – including Saint Kentigern students.

The online competition aims to test students on their vocabulary acquisition and understanding in the language they have chosen to learn, awarding points for correct answers. Students are required to translate vocabulary in a digital flashcard format both from Latin to English and English to Latin. The points for correct answers are then added to both their individual tally, as well as the school’s overall results.

This year, our Latin students performed exceptionally well and achieved some very pleasing results. As a school, Saint Kentigern placed 1st in New Zealand and 7th overall in the world with some outstanding individual performances contributing significantly to this result. Year 10 student, Lucy Nie was the top individual Saint Kentigern student across all languages and ended up placing 3rd in the world for Latin! Other notable performances include Year 12 students, Samantha Fei and Ebba Olsen who both received an Elite award and Year 9 student, Heeju Rho who received a Gold award. These students received their awards at full school assembly today.

Well done to all the students who contributed to Saint Kentigern’s ranking in New Zealand and the world, especially Lucy!

Language Perfect

Brothers, Craig and Shane Smith are the founders of Language Perfect, a software programme originally conceived by Craig while at Saint Kentigern to help him study for his French and Japanese exams. His older brother, Shane, developed the platform software to support Craig’s prototype and together they have built an international company with an award winning learning platform. Each year, over 100,000 students from around the globe logon for the largest online languages competition on the planet, together answering over 50 million vocabulary and grammar questions under time pressure in any one of 14 languages over a period of 10 days. This makes it one of the most used educational websites in the world during competition time. 

Entrepreneurs at heart, the Smiths also took their business one step further. Built on the same premise as Language Perfect, their later release, Education Perfect, turned its attention to all subjects across the curriculum, taking the same formula to ask exacting questions that both challenge and aid learning and the acquisition of knowledge.

As ‘digital natives in a global society’ their ultimate goal is that each curriculum area, whether science, mathematics or social studies, will also be translatable into a range of international languages, opening the way for students to learn key facts in more than one language, ultimately opening opportunities for overseas studies.