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Enroll now for 1st Quarter 2023 starting in January
Enroll now for 1st Quarter 2023 starting in January
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
| Circle | Texts |
|---|---|
| Comparative-Historical English + Gothic | The Gothic and Anglo-Saxon Gospels in parallel columns, with the versions of Wycliffe and Tyndale |
| Comparative Historical Religion | Mircea Eliada – A History of Religious Ideas |
| French {Classic Novels} | Émile Zola – La Fortune des Rougon |
| German {Modern Classics} | Max Frisch – Homo Faber (Suhrkamp) |
| German {Classic Drama} | Goethe – Faust |
| German {Contemporary Novels} | Walter Moers – Rumo & Die Wunder im Dunkeln (Piper) |
| Great Books of the East | The Zend Avesta |
| Great Books of the West | Plutarch’s Lives |
| Guided Self-Study in Introductory Arabic | Assimil’s Arabic course, word-for-word retellings of classical texts |
| Guided Self-Study in Introductory Latin | Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, Dr. Giles editions of classical texts |
| Latin {Conversational} | Selection of Stories from 13th and 14th Century Manuscripts; Traupman – Conversational Latin |
| Latin {Drills} | Selections of pattern drills and rapid oral question and answer exercises |
| Medieval Literary Languages [Mittelhochdeutsch] | Das Nibelungenlied: Mittelhochdeutsch / Neuhochdeutsch (Reclam) |
| Medieval Literary Languages [Ancien Français] | Chrétien de Troyes – Erec Et Enide (Le Livre de Poche, Lettres Gothiques) |
| Medieval Literary Languages [Old Norse] | Sigrid Valfells and James E. Cathey – Old Icelandic: An Introductory Course (Oxford) |
| The Path of the Polyglot or Principles of Polyliteracy | Manuscript of The Path of the Polyglot |
| Spanish | Carlos Fuentes – La Muerte de Artemio Cruz |
The purpose of the academy is to foster a community of lifelong learners. Instead of classes or courses, the offerings are referred to as circles, which will be kept small so as to provide for an intimate learning environment. There are two kinds of circles:
These are for learning to read literature in foreign languages with ease, enjoyment, and understanding. In these circles, participants prepare readings ahead of time, then, during the session, go around the circle in turn, reading aloud, summarizing what they have understood, and discussing the material in the target language.
As far as possible, these foreign language circles are grouped by proficiency level, judged by your responses to the sample text reading provided in the application form.
These are for discussing the content of Great Books read in English, and for support group consultations for self-study of languages. These are in a more traditional seminar format than the smaller circles, with focus on content rather than language. Thus, there is greater responsibility for participants to actively engage in discussion.
For the Great Books of the West, we read the texts chronologically and thematically, beginning with works of history and biography.
For Sacred Books of the East, we work through major texts by respective tradition.
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.
If you are interested in the academy’s offerings, you should plan on attending for at least several months. You may sign up for a single month initially to see if this form of continuing adult education is for you, but after that, we urge you to become a member by signing up for a continuing subscription.
This is because the Academy works by reading and discussing significant longer texts, which is naturally a question of multiple months. To do this effectively, we need to form cohesive cohorts whose participants can commit to conversing together for long enough to digest, analyze, and enjoy a text of 300+ pages. To that end, the Academy will run 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 will consist of 12 weekly meetings (an average of 4 meetings a month, with some months having 5, others only 3), with a 1-week break either between or during quarters. Please note that quarters may begin or end on the first or last days of adjacent calendar months. When you subscribe, you will be asked how many quarters in the calendar year you currently plan to attend.
Becoming a member of the Academy with a recurring subscription provide the following benefits:
You may cancel your subscription at any time should your circumstances change, but in that case we ask for as much advance notice as possible.
You may also opt to pay for a single “month” (4 sessions) at a time. However, please note that you will not have access to the first three advantages listed above, and the price will be higher at $140/month for circles and $75/month for seminars.
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.
© 2023 Alexander Arguelles. All rights reserved.
[Franciscan philosopher Roger] Bacon was right to say that the conquest of wisdom passes through the knowledge of languages…Bacon was right that the first duty of a scholar is to study languages! – Guglielmo da Baskerville