When it is time to share fun facts in class, junior Liza Bandrivska comes prepared with her four Seals of Biliteracy and her ability to speak five languages: Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, German, and English. 

Growing up in Western Ukraine, she first learned Ukrainian and Russian from her parents, Bandrivska said. She started learning English in school, starting in first grade, she said. 

“My favorite language is Ukrainian because it is my native language, but my favorite to study was English because it is used everywhere,” Bandrivska said. 

In 2022, Bandrivska moved to Poland for six months due to the war in Ukraine and began to learn Polish. She took additional language classes at her school in Poland to learn the basis of the language. 

  “I didn’t have a choice but to learn Polish when I was living there, and then when I moved to the United States I thought, why not take the Seal of Biliteracy test,” Bandrivska said. 

At South, Bandrivska is studying German and gained a Seal of Biliteracy in German on Sept. 27. This was her fourth Seal, including her previous three Seals of Ukranian, Russian, and Polish. 

“It is so much easier to learn a language when you’re in the environment,” Bandrivska said. “For example, for German, I hear it at South for around three hours a week or so in class, but in Poland, I heard Polish everywhere I went.”

Amanda Moritz, Instructional Supervisor of World Languages, describes learning in a real environment as  “fight or flight mode”, meaning the language has to be spoken in order to survive. In a language class, there is no fight or flight instinct; it is much more calm, but time is at an advantage, Moritz said. 

“We have an advantage here at South that we have 90-minute-blocks, because we get to spend an extensive amount of time in one sitting immersed in the language,” Moritz said. “The teacher is speaking in the target language pretty much 100 percent of the time once you get to a certain level.”

In the past five years that Moritz has been a teacher at South, she has never seen a student with four Seals of Biliteracy like Bandrivska, Moritz said. However, she has seen an increase in students taking the Seal of Biliteracy test with a remarkable 36 students gaining two seals, Moritz said. 

Bandrivska sees these other languages as beneficial in not only being able to understand people speaking different languages in public, but also as a way to explore different cultures. 

“Try every language possible, every place possible, because you never know what’s going to be the right fit for you, until you try it, “ Bandrivska said. “The more you know, the better.”