How do you spell p-r-o-d-i-g-y?

There's a great story in today's Globe and Mail about an 11-year-old spelling champion. 2½ years ago, she spoke no English — only Chinese and French. But now she will represent her school in the regional spelling championship, which may catapult her into a national competition.

How is this possible? Who learns not only to speak English, but to spell it in only 2½ years?! It is truly extraordinary, according to Jack Chambers, a sociolinguist at the University of Toronto:

[Mr. Chambers] points out that learning a language and becoming a good speller are different things.

"Everybody knows children have a God-given ability for mastering language that gets lost somewhere around puberty," he says. "But spelling is not something that's a gift; it's an acquisition. It's something we have to learn, and it's a lot more like learning how to play chess than learning how to speak."

Wenyi Yin's first language is Mandarin. She was born in Changchun, a city in northeastern China, in 1994.

When she was 5, her parents moved the family to Belgium, where her father, a chemical engineer, earned his doctorate, and where French is spoken at school.

"We couldn't speak French," says her father, Zhihui Yin. "Suddenly, in eight or nine months, she spoke fluent French." In 2003, Mr. Yin finished his studies. He and his wife, Yajie, decided to move to Canada, where Mr. Yin found a research position at the University of Toronto.

When they left Belgium, her father says, Wenyi's English vocabulary consisted of two words: "Okay and bye-bye, and that's it."

The family had only two months to adjust before the school year would begin. They exposed Wenyi to as much English as they could. But

the morning announcements, in English, were lost on the nine-year-old as she settled into her seat at Huron Street Public School in Toronto.

"When they said, 'Please stand up for O Canada,' I didn't know what to do," she says now. …

Wenyi was in good company at Huron; about one-third of the 430 students have a first language other than English. She was matched with another Mandarin-speaking student, who served as a mentor.

While she initially appeared shy and quiet, Wenyi was soaking up words like a sponge. When her parents would bring home a fresh batch of books from the library, thinking they would keep her busy for a week, she'd take them back after a few hours and ask for more.

"I remember I learned English, the everyday words, in three months I guess," she says. "I just listened to other people say it, and it just registered in my head. It just started building up, bit by bit."

This is already amazing by me. I've studied French and New Testament Greek, but frankly I'm terrible at learning a second language. I am awestruck by the rest of Wenyi's story:

One morning last fall, her ears pricked up during morning announcements. "Do you like to S-P-E-L-L?" Samantha Berman, a Grade 5 teacher, asked over the PA system. "Is spell check a superfluous tool for you? Do you like competition?"

Yes, Wenyi thought. She liked words — all of them, she says — so she made her way to Room 13 for the inaugural meeting of the school's CanSpell Club on Oct. 3.

The club's 11 members, from Grades 4, 5 and 6, met once a week. Using the CanSpell study list, they would fill their 45-minute lunch break with word games, crossword puzzles and forays into the dictionary to find the words' origins and definitions — words like 'Lilliputian' and 'oxytocia' and 'hydrangea.'

At their first bee on Jan. 26, in front of their classmates, the competitors dropped off, one by one, as they worked through a list of about 50 words. When her last opponent flubbed 'attuned,' Wenyi got it right, then coasted to victory on a gimme. "It was so easy," she says. "It was 'helmet'."

This month, she advanced another step by winning a written bee, overseen by Ms. Berman. That win assured Wenyi's role as Huron's representative at the regionals on March 5. She will face spellers from 73 other Toronto schools in a showdown at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, one of 14 regional bees to be held across the country.

The winner and runner-up from each regional contest will advance to the CanWest CanSpell National Spelling Bee in Ottawa on April 5.

OK, Wenyi has a way to go before we can declare her a national champion. But obviously she has an extraordinary aptitude for language. I am so impressed!