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.

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.

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.