It’s always great to see your name at the pole position of any ranking, and for Conor Fuller, his number-one result came from learning a second language.
The St Paul’s Collegiate School student was placed top in the world for Spanish in the Language Perfect World Championships.
For the online competition, each student has an account which tracks their progress as they earn points by correctly translating between their chosen language and English.
For Spanish, Fuller earned a total of 26,323 points, 1406 points above the second place winner.
Participants were suggested to spend eight hours a day, over eight days, working on the questionnaire, which was broken into categories.
Fuller said he spent eight hours on the competition at the start, before slowly doing less as it went on.
Categories included English to Spanish, where students had to translate an English word to Spanish; Spanish speaking, where they had to listen to Spanish and write it in English; speaking Spanish to writing Spanish, and English text that they would have to translate into Spanish.
Fuller’s interest in the language spawned from taking classes at St Paul’s. In August last year he went on an exchange to Argentina where he said he "experienced living as a teenager".
"I went over with a good grounding of the basics, and then straight away I found myself being able to understand what people were saying. After three months I was able to talk kind of fluently."
Fuller participated in the championships last year where he placed top in New Zealand in Spanish. His top world ranking this year is due to continuous hard work.
"I think you're definitely going to lose it if you just stop," he said. "Every language is hard to learn. If you want to become fluent, the best way to learn is to live in the country."
"The sound of the language is really cool and they have some really funny words that sum up awkward things in English that we can't really describe."
His favourite word is "pencil sharpener", or "sacapuntas" in Spanish.
