How Do You Spell Victory?

Colleen Ung of Chavez Middle School won the right to represent San Bernardino at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which ran May 24 through 29. One of 285 spelling bee contestants ranging in age from 9 to 15, Ung is an eighth-grader and a former English learner student who is now fluent in English. Her native language is Cantonese, which is spoken mainly in China and Hong Kong. According to the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State, it would take an average native English speaker about 2,200 class hours to learn Cantonese. Ung's curiosity and appetite for solving mysteries often lands her in the world of fictional detectives like Sherlock Holmes and browsing the crime pages of the newspaper. When she isn't busy investigating the world of criminal justice, Colleen also loves studying space, anatomy, math and science. She works to present effective speeches and arguments with her school's speech and debate club, and she'll need those skills in her future career as an attorney, and later as a judge. Renaissance thinker Leonardo da Vinci is Colleen's role model, and she aspires to think about and process the world in the same way as the great inventor, artist and polymath. All Scripps National Spelling Bee competitors received Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged from Merriam-Webster and a 2015 United States Mint proof set from Jay Sugarman.