The purpose of the academy is to foster a community of lifelong learners.  We prefer to refer to our offerings as circles instead of classes or courses since they are small groups focused around reading and discussion of texts.  Unless specifically noted otherwise, all circles:

• Meet for 60 minutes once per week via Zoom.

• Aim to have a target average of 6 participants.

• Are ongoing, i.e., rather than meeting for a set term, when we finish one book, we begin another.

• Cost $150 per circle, per month

French / German / Italian / Spanish Literature

• Suitable for intermediate and advanced students of French, German, Italian, and/or Spanish.

• Learn to read literature in foreign languages with enjoyment and understanding.

• Read aloud, summarize, and discuss texts exclusively in the target languages.

• Homework for each session roughly 20 pages per week.

• Currently running (for intermediate and above):

  • French – Les grands auteurs français

  • German – Short stories

  • Italian – Giovanni Boccaccio

  • Spanish – Latin American literature
    
    
    

“This Culture of Ours”: East Asian Civilization in the World

• A special two-year course taught by Wang Xing Hao, a specialist in East Asian philosophy, who trained at Yale-NUS and the University of Chicago, and specializes in Classical Chinese, Daoism, Buddhism, and early Chinese classics.
• Explore East Asia (China, Japan, Korea) as a cultural sphere through primary sources and key historical texts.
• Trace the concept of li (理) across Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism, encounters with Western thought, and modern relevance.
• Examine East Asia’s cultural, social, and political history while allowing space for student-driven interests.
• Situate East Asia within global contexts—India, the West, and the Silk Road—highlighting its porous, interconnected boundaries.
• For more information about this unique course, click here.
  
  
  

Principles of Polyliteracy

• A lecture course that picks up where Path of the Polyglot left off, covering topics such as systematic selection of languages and language learning sequences, cycles and epicycles for maintenance and use, the learning of language families, memory training, and more.

• Participants may also request in advance that I cover specific topics for them

• A comprehensive overview of every aspect of embarking upon a lifelong journey of literary language learning.

• Provides the theoretical framework you need to be systematic in your studies over the long term.

• Provides an opportunity for interactive guidance and structure in planning your language studies.
  
  
  

Persian – Intensive Introduction to Reading Literary Persian

• A new genre of class: practice a time-tested but oft-neglected technique by learning the language through the literature, translating until you no longer need to do so.

• Students will be provided with interlinear and bilingual texts to read, translate, discuss, and learn from.

• The goal is to read Persian literature, not to speak the language, but if the former leads to the latter – so much the better.
  
  
  

Spoken Latin

• Suitable for those able to read and analyze Latin well.

• Focus on developing the abilities to speak and think in the language.

• Focus on developing the ability to debate in scholastic fashion.
  
  
  

Beginning Readings in Arabic

• Working through and discussing classic tales from fully vowelized texts.

• Homework consists of lesson preparation and review.

• The goal is to form a cohort for reading and discussing texts like Kalila wa Dimna.
  

   

Guided Self-Study in Sanskrit  

• Working through Assimil’s Le Sanskrit.

• Homework consists of lesson preparation and review.

• The goal is to form a cohort for reading and discussing texts like the Panchatantra.

   

Guided Self-Study in Diachronic Greek

• Students will study the Greek language through its various historical stages for concentrated periods of time to build familiarity with Hellenistic literature, history and culture.

• Currently working through Λόγος. Ἑλληνικὴ γλῶσσα αὐτοεικονογραφημένη.

• Homework consists of lesson preparation and review.
  
  
  

Great Books of the Western World

• Work through Mortimer Adler’s University of Chicago collection.

• Lifelong learning through conversation and Socratic dialogue.

• Challenge your mind by discussing and digesting difficult but important texts.

• Homework consists of reading roughly 60 pages per week.

Live Learning

Live Learning sessions are guided, active language-learning groups for students who want structure, regularity, and a clear method for working through serious language-learning materials.

These are not lecture courses. They are closer to an intellectual gym class: I work through the material in front of you, and your task is to actively follow along, imitate the procedures, and learn how to study the material effectively. The aim is to keep you from getting bogged down, help the material stick, and show you how to make language learning systematic and enjoyable.

Each group meets for 20 minutes a day, 5 days a week.

Payment is by quarter, not by monthly subscription, in order to encourage steady commitment and help students build the habit of daily study. The fee is $600 per quarter.

Our current Live Learning groups are as follows:

Polish
Mówimy po polsku: A Beginner’s Course of Polish by W. Bisko, S. Karolak, D. Wasilewska, and S. Krynski, 1979.

French
New French With Ease by Anthony Bulger, 591 pages.

Italian
Italian With Ease by Giovanna Galdo and Ena Marchi, adapted by Adrien Hilal, 422 pages.

Latin
Adler’s Practical Grammar of the Latin Language, 706 pages.

These groups have already been running for a number of months, so although they are not suitable for absolute beginners, students with some prior experience should be able to join and adapt to the method quickly. Recordings will be made available for those who want to catch up, and prospective students are welcome to visit a session before signing up to see where the group is and how the material is being handled.

2nd Quarter, 2026
(April, May, June)

Note: All times are in U.S. Central / Chicago time

Reading and Guided Study Circles

Guest Courses

Prescribed Text List

What Current Students are Saying

Professor Arguelles’s videos have long been the foundation upon which I learned how to learn languages as an autodidact adult. His foreign-language reading circles have helped solidify this foundation by making me improve my skills at reading aloud, which I have found to be an indispensable skill for making a language come alive when I am reading alone. The Professor also helps deepen our understanding with incisive and often humorous questions, which make the plot and characters more vivid and memorable, and help provide context for unfamiliar vocabulary and expressions. It has also been a pleasure to talk with the other students in class, who have been as interesting, intellectually curious, and open-to-learning as the Professor himself.

The Professor’s study-with-me sessions have also provided a great window into his methods. If you have the opportunity to converse with him in these sessions, he is very skilled at adjusting his speech to match your own level of understanding, while still making sure that you learn something new.

I would heartily recommend joining one or more of the Academy’s circles if you are at all interested in reading foreign-language literature, learning historical linguistics, learning-how-to-learn languages, or exploring the Great Books of various cultures.

Prateek

Software engineer

Professor Arguelles’ academy is a magical place. Small circles read and discuss texts, while he deftly facilitates, providing a kind and intellectually stimulating environment tailored to each student. In the Great Books circles, we focus on content: what is being said, why, and other Adlerian questions. In the other circles I’m in, we also focus on language: identifying interesting structures and words, correcting pronunciation, summarizing what we’ve just read, reading out loud, listening with our eyes closed, and so forth.

The circles are invariably engrossing, whether it’s the first day looking at a medieval language via a related modern language, mixed linguistic and content discussion for intermediate readers, or discussion of a chapter of a Great Book. The books are well chosen, and Professor Arguelles is incredibly skilled at asking participants questions that stretch them just the right amount: enough to make the circle lively, while keeping the atmosphere at a perfect balance of playful and focused. His wealth of highly relevant knowledge, both linguistic and cultural, really enriches the experience.

If you want to read a text that has a Circle and discuss it with a handful of people while being drawn into understanding and engaging with it more deeply, I’d strongly recommend applying. Whether you want to summarize, remember, and discuss texts more freely, deepen your knowledge while sharpening your skills in a contemporary language, or simply have a few extra intellectually engaging hours per week, this academy is fantastic.

Luke

Software developoer

As much as I enjoy language learning, I found myself in a rut with French. The brain thrives on novelty and repetition. My French routine needed a remodel. The idea of spending time with the well-known polyglot, Alexander Arguelles, was an excellent chance to bring new inspiration. Discussing French literature with a university professor in a small group is something I look forward to each week. Together, we are diving head-first into a classic by Zola. For an hour every week, I am immersed in a world of French countryside, lively characters and tales of what life was like years ago. The group discussion has a surprising amount of laughter and community. I recommend these reading circles to all my language learning friends. These sessions are absolutely delightful.

Elizabeth

Writer, acupuncturist and budding permaculturist

Distilling the essence of my time with Professor Argüelles into a brief list, I might include terms such as edification, passion, progress and inspiration. Yet to stop there would be a terrible injustice to everything he offers at his academy. Long have I had the passion to dabble in my interests; but what Professor Argüelles offers, beyond expertise and an encyclopedic mind for the ages, is the practice of focused, sustained learning combined with an eagerness to share his experience and knowledge with the world.

Though I, like Professor Argüelles, have a strong background in the humanities, it has been an absolute pleasure collaborating with students with the most disparate of backgrounds, all of whom share a similar zeal for knowledge and languages. Be it in literature or languages, Professor Argüelles is as adept as any in tailoring his courses to the level, pace and interests of his students. The Alexander Argüelles Academy has truly been a gem for me on my personal journey and has significantly enhanced and refined my own language learning practices as well as my approach to systematically reading literature.

Nathan

Student of medieval literature

In less than three months, my foreign language goals have been clarified and my methods have been overhauled. I am a significantly more mature and effective language learner than I was when I began.

In addition, I’m finally able to participate in a rigorous, professionally guided discussion of classic texts in seminar format, instead of merely reading through them alone. This is truly the “lifelong learning” I’ve been waiting for.

I highly recommend the Arguelles Academy to all those interested in languages and literatures.

Albert

Teacher

I found the approach to language education at schools to be wholly insufficient: a total of 2-3 hours spread out across the workdays; I barely made any progress in English until I started dedicating time to consuming content in English outside of classes, which quickly yielded great results. For the longest time I and many others wondered how and why I managed to make such a breakthrough, but when I came across the Professor’s videos on YouTube in 2018, I found that not only did he share my sentiment about the inadequacy of school programmes, but he also explained how language-learning works, and it matched my experience with English perfectly! Thanks to his videos I managed to make breakthroughs in Norwegian, Ukrainian and Latin, which I had been studying at the time but with little success. Since then I have had a go at a couple dozen languages, and really enjoyed the process of learning them, and I have been doing my best to spread this joy to others as well by telling people of the Professor’s and other polyglots’ approaches and leading by example.

I was overjoyed at the Professor’s return to YouTube in 2021, and felt greatly honoured to have been invited to a discussion circle on his channel. When the Academy launched, I jumped at the opportunity to participate in live Latin classes with the Professor, and I greatly enjoyed them. During the classes we speak nothing but Latin, and the participants take turns reading passages aloud from Mediaeval philosophical and literary works. In order to make sure that we understand what we read the Professor has us explain the passage in our own terms, which is a very helpful exercise. After a while of reading we start discussing the philosophical messages in the text, which is the most fun part of the classes for me personally. Arguing from different points of view entirely in spoken Latin is a wonderful challenge that rarely comes up in my day-to-day life, and the addition of the Professor’s sense of humour and his deep and extremely helpful insight into the social and intellectual context of the works in question makes the experience an absolute joy, both emotionally and intellectually. I was consistently surprised at how much more sense Erasmus’s colloquies make when put in their proper context, making me appreciate one of my favourite Mediaeval authors even more!

The Professor’s courses are a wealth of fun education for all who are interested in languages and great literature, both ancient and Mediaeval.

Yan

Physical chemistry teacher

I had always felt that the treatment of Classics and Modern Languages in universities as two separate disciplines was unsatisfying and did not really do justice to either. So when I came across the Q&As on HTLAL Forum where Professor Arguelles recommended the diachronic study of ancient and modern languages, I was immediately intrigued. He gave detailed advice on topics such as the sequence for studying the Romance and Germanic families in their ancient and modern forms, the value of studying contemporary languages such as Hindi or Modern Greek as a way back to their antecedents in Sanskrit and Classical Greek, and the central place of Latin in the study of Western languages, including its medieval and modern forms and its role as a spoken language.

All this was immensely useful in planning my own studies, and when the Professor’s Language Academy opened in 2022 it was the ideal opportunity to see how he integrated ancient and modern language study in the live learning environment. In the circle looking at Comparative Early Modern and Middle English, Old English and Gothic, we take turns to read aloud, compare and translate a short extract in four versions spanning 1,100 years of Germanic language development. In each session Professor Arguelles provides detailed information, lexical, grammatical and etymological, with a summary of key learning points, all communicated with humour and a light touch. His unique insight into language-learning techniques and his deep knowledge of Germanic languages has enabled us to cover a lot of ground very quickly.

For anyone who loves languages and wants to go further under the guidance of a polyglot with a lifetime’s experience of language study, I strongly recommend the Arguelles Academy’s courses.

Adam

Internal auditor, pianist, and a language learning enthusiast

The purpose of my Virtual Academy to continue to offer the guidance I have provided for over 20 years as a university professor of languages and literature, but now to participants from all over the world who want to continue the journey of lifelong learning.

The focus of the academy will be on weekly reading and discussion circles exclusively in the target languages. These circles provide the support you need to become an independent reader of literature in a foreign language. The regular meetings ensure that you form the habit of reading consistently, and in them you will gain cultural knowledge, conversational ability, and enriched vocabulary. Whether you have just finished teaching yourself a language or whether you studied it in the past and have now grown rusty, these circles can help you make the transition from intermediate to advanced.

The overall purpose of the academy is to take advantage of advances in technology that now permit people from all over the world to congregate together virtually. This ability represents a development that can and should revolutionize education, which has become too enshrined in degree programs for those primarily in their first decades of life, with institutions offering little in the way of continuing lifelong learning opportunities despite the fact that this is held out as an ideal.

The academy aims to remedy this by offering opportunities for adults to develop the ability to read literature in foreign languages at any stage of life, as well as support for learning languages in the first place, and for reading and discussing the Great Books of various civilizations in the kind of ongoing seminar environment in which they can be increasingly appreciated. This learning environment is designed to be suitable both for those who want to develop abilities in a single language or area, as well as to provide a foundation for those who might wish to develop more wide-ranging skills and understanding.

How the Academy Works

The Academy offers two kinds of subscription-based participation:

Both offerings operate on a quarterly basis:

1st Quarter: January, February, March
2nd Quarter: April, May, June
3rd Quarter: July, August, September
4th Quarter: October, November, December

Each quarter follows a 12-week structure, with a 1-week break either between or during quarters. The break will usually fall during the last week of the final month of a quarter unless unforeseen circumstances require it to be moved. If that happens, the change will be announced in the Schedule section. Please note that quarters may begin or end on the first or last days of adjacent calendar months.

As the Academy is based in the U.S., and a plurality of students reside there, we observe U.S. national holidays.

You are welcome to attend a circle or session as a guest before deciding whether this form of continuing adult education is for you, but participation in the Academy is based on an ongoing monthly subscription.

By subscribing to a Reading and Guided Study Circle, you become a member of the Academy and will have a strong voice in selecting the texts to be read.

Those who recall my old website may also recall the extensive description I had there for an ideal systematic training in polyliteracy and the ideal of developing it into an academic discipline. This virtual academy represents the initial steps in that direction.

First and foremost, the above offerings should provide the stability to eventually offer more and more specialized instruction. Furthermore, the offerings themselves combined can form the core of a master’s of arts program. For instance, someone who takes two full years literature courses in two languages, two full years of two Great Books seminars, and two full years of guided self-instruction in an exotic language should have completed the equivalent of enough credit hours for the award of a degree pending completion also of a master’s thesis.

Anyone interested in this should indicate his intentions from the outset so that hours and progress may be carefully tracked, and should also understand that this is still an ideal with accreditation and affiliation with an awarding body still pending.