Surbiton High GCSE student excels in languages - 23/06/2010

Year 11 pupil Ana Grgurinovic has always had an amazing ear for language. Born to Croatian parents who came to England 18 years ago as a consequence of the Bosnian War, Ana speaks Serbo Croat at home and can even read the language in the not so common Cyrillic alphabet. Her skills in this language are further enhanced every year during the month she spends each summer with her grandmother in Croatia.

At Surbiton High School she will shortly sit her GCSEs in Spanish and German. Despite her natural aptitude for language, she says that she did not really enjoy her language lessons until she came to Surbiton High, where she found the lessons to be well organised and the teachers highly motivating.

She regards language as ‘her thing'. Having recently attended a careers event at Westminster University, promoted by the Modern Languages Department, where she was drawn to a course on interpreting, she was fortunate enough to have a family friend who stepped in with a contact and Ana is now enrolled on a translating and interpreting programme. Ana has been experimenting with ‘live translation'. This involves spoken and written translation of English to Croatian and vice versa. Ana says that her course tutor is very enthusiastic and this feeds her own desire to learn. Of Ana, her tutor says, "I am continually amazed by her aptitude... Her ability and enthusiasm remind me of that which I have seen in some of the most successful pupils who have completed our course ...I am so proud to be Ana's allocated teacher and I am sure that she will go very far in her linguistic life. She really is a rarity which I did not expect to encounter at her age. "

Ana hopes to utilise the skills that she learns on the programme in her future career. Her aim is to continue in the sixth form at Surbiton High, and on completion of her A-levels she hopes to study languages at university followed by a conversion course to law, perhaps hoping to specialise in European law.

Ana's gift for linguistics is undoubted and with her enthusiasm and dedication to her studies, she is sure to succeed in all that she does. We wish her all the best for her future.