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Boys from the Manchester Grammar School (MGS) have performed exceptionally at this year’s international Vocab Express Championships. MGS came third in the Genius Cup and sixth in the Challenge Cup, amassing the highest number of points in the School’s history. Boys also won individual language cups for Latin, Russian, Chinese, Hebrew and Arabic and, as a School, MGS came third in Italian and Spanish. The Vocab Express Championships sees more than 320 Schools and 35,000 students from around the world taking part in a multi-lingual vocabulary learning competition, involving 13 different languages.
There were a number of outstanding individual performances from MGS Boys - MGS Vocab Express Champion Christian Owen, of Glossop, achieved an incredible 125,480 points – smashing all previous MGS records – to finish fifth in the world as well as coming top of the global leaderboard in Latin. Lloyd Hampton, from Warrington, topped the Russian league with an excellent 33,625 points and Sam Rubens, from Whitefield, came first in the world student rankings for Hebrew. Suhaib Adem, from Newcastle, and Baqar Ghori, of Ardwick, finished first and second in the world respectively for Arabic, the first time MGS has won that section of the international competition.
Chris Jarrett, teacher of Russian at MGS, said: “Our boys performed absolutely superbly throughout the week. We have so many talented linguists here at MGS who brought us some fantastic victories. To both finish third in the Genius Cup and sixth in the Challenge Cup are excellent results given the sheer volume of competition this year.
“All the boys can be rightly proud of their performances, and this year our overall scores were records for the School, setting the bar even higher for next year. There were also some astonishing individual performances and I am immensely proud of the dedication of our boys to stretch their vocabulary skills.
“Just as importantly, our boys will take these skills and their knowledge and use them to their advantage in the years to come.”
Christian, 16, said: “I was very pleased to achieve such a high ranking in the Vocab Express leaderboards. “It was a very intense, full-on week, in which I really had to dedicate most of my free time to studying, but the feeling of success at the end was very much worth the hard work. Of course, it'll also help when I do my GCSEs in the summer since I learned the entire GCSE word lists.”
Suhaib, 15, added: “From the start I wanted to hold first place in Arabic. Perseverance was my key. As I saw that competition was high, I began to dedicate a lot of my time retaining first position on the leaderboard. “As time was running out there was close competition between first and second but once again my perseverance drove me forward and proved successful resulting in being first. Arabic is a very useful language. It will definitely help me in the future as links grow closer between the West and Middle East. Although it is a hard language to learn, I enjoy a challenge and really wanted to do something a little different.”
