|
|
Please remember that you can join (or rejoin) the Academy at any moment. All of our courses are ongoing. Therefore, unlike a typical university seminar, the Academy courses are structured to easily accommodate new students at any point in time. More information about our current offerings can be found on the Academy website. |
Musings From The Professor's Desk
|
Dear Readers,
I am sure that most people who are familiar with me and my approach to languages and literatures will not be surprised to learn that I lean towards Luddite. I have been an eyewitness to and more often than not an unwilling forced participant in every stage of the ongoing development of the Information Revolution since the mid-1980’s, from personal computers themselves to all that we do with and through them. Although I am aware that I am biting the hand that feeds me – after all, the Academy in its virtual form would be utterly impossible without Zoom – I cannot help but be critical of most other aspects of this larger revolution, wondering at times whether the seeming advances may actually be doing more harm than good. However, there is one subset of this revolution that I now whole-heartedly embrace and endorse, namely the Audiobook Revolution. This was not always the case – for years I was unaware of, indifferent to, and even skeptical of it as well, so I would like to reflect upon that and talk about how the use of audiobooks has become an increasingly integral and important aspect of my approach over the years, to the point where I now find them indispensable and if I were to no longer have access to them, this would fundamentally change the way I live my life.
A bit of history: “Spoken Word” recordings, usually excerpts from books, date back into the LP-era, but audiobooks proper, i.e., full-length texts from “Recorded Books” or “Books on Tape,” only came into being in the late 1970’s, as I was entering adolescence. Initially these were literally “books for the blind,” marketed towards and often only available for the handicapped. Even after they started to become more widely marketed and available, they were stigmatized as such. I myself long harbored a distinct prejudice against them. I can recall thinking, when their section first appeared in the public library, “why on earth would anyone who knows how to read want or need to listen to someone else read instead?” It did not occur to me to even give them a try – I would have probably been insulted if someone had suggested it to me. Indeed, I only became interested in them for foreign language learning in the late 1990’s. Even then, their availability was limited, as I can recall searching long and hard for them throughout Saint Petersburg in the winter of 2000, when I was there for an immersion Russian stay. I eventually located them in a special bookstore for the blind, but I then had to get some sort of special permission to purchase them.
Fast forward to today and how different the audiobook landscape is. As I just mentioned, I first opened my mind to audiobooks purely as a form of advanced language study, but as I listened to more and more of them, read by talented narrators, I became increasingly captivated by this form of consuming literature. I have now been a subscriber to Amazon.de for going on 15 years and purchased close to 300 “volumes” from them. I never cease to be amazed at their ever-widening selection of books in an equally expanding variety of tongues. Of course, there are many other sources of audiobooks as well, and all in all I take this proliferation as an enormously positive development that greatly facilities the development of polyliteracy. When a talented narrator delivers a text, this truly opens up new dimensions of getting to know it.
I think “reading with the ears” is a more accurate, if also more awkward, term than “listening” to describe how I consume audiobooks. Although they are portrayed as a means of capturing back time lost to commuting, or of multi-tasking while exercising or doing chores – and although I myself do at times use them as such – I find that consuming them with greater attention and care, pausing to restate what one has heard, and perhaps even producing a written summary as one goes along, makes them all the more rewarding. In either form, the older I get, the more I read with the ears rather than with the eyes, and this is due to pure preference as much as it is to presbyopia.
The content and style of the author are the two main components of appreciating a book when reading with the eyes; when reading with the ears, a third component, namely the delivery of the narrator, also comes into play. Indeed, the talent of the narrator is really the indispensable factor in the audibility of an audiobook. Realizing this on deeper levels as time goes by gave me the impetus to do something that I never did before, namely read literature aloud myself as a major means of approaching and digesting it. This is now the single most important part of my practice, though as I just wrote, I never used to do this, a fact that I now find inexplicable, but there it is. I will write more about the importance of reading aloud next month. For now let me close these musings with words of gratitude for the existence of audiobooks, for the efforts of all those who pioneered the availability of this form of text, and for the talent of those narrators whose interpretations of these texts make reading them in this form so very rewarding.
With best regards,
Alexander Arguelles
|
|
|
|
Meet Robbie KunzEntrepreneur and businessman. He co-owns Independence Brothers, a custom-fit leather jacket company, with his brother. He also owns and runs a number of Airbnb properties outside New York City and Philadelphia in the Poconos mountains.
|
|
|
“I first learned of Professor Arguelles when I was in high school where I chanced upon his posts on the HTLAL forum. His depth of knowledge and dedication to language learning intrigued me then. Later in 2010, when Professor Arguelles sent out a message that he would see students while he was in Singapore, I was ecstatic! I was in Tokyo working on building an online business when I finally thought I had my opportunity to meet and study with him. But alas, our stars did not align. When Professor Arguelles finally opened his Academy online in 2022, I knew it was the perfect chance to go study with him. I have always had a fascination with foreign languages and I took every opportunity to study them. I studied Spanish and French in high school, and then Japanese later in college. I studied some other languages here and there but got distracted by business and making money. However, I always wanted to consummate my fantasy of learning foreign languages. After joining the Academy with Professor Arguelles and the other students, I have redoubled my efforts in studying foreign languages. Moving into the summer of this year 2023, I am studying 8 languages everyday: Spanish, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Teochew, Korean, Arabic, and Sanskrit. A bonus passive language is French because I use that to study the Korean and Arabic Assimils (you can see me talk more about my language learning plans here). I have the academy to thank for Spanish, Korean, Arabic, and Sanskrit because I take classes for those (or was inspired by the now defunct "Study With Me" for Korean). However, had it not been for the Academy and Professor Arguelles, I can safely say I would not have had the courage and motivation to study so many varied foreign languages. For that I am eternally grateful. Being in the Academy with Professor Arguelles and the other students while learning foreign languages everyday, I am in paradise.”
Additional student accounts can be found on the Academy website under Testimonials. |
September Book Recommendation
|
|
|
|
This month I would like to recommend, in audiobook form, a work on Proto-Indo-European, namely Professor David W. Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, as read by Tom Perkins. The book, published by Princeton University Press in 2010, will probably be of interest as such to all those in the Academy doing Latin, Sanskrit, Old Norse, etc., as it provides a relatively up-to-date synthesis of anthropological, archaeological, and linguistic perspectives on the Indo-European question. The narrator, or interpreter, Tom Perkins, is not the most dynamic of readers; however, he specializes in delivering scholarly tomes from a wide variety of disciplines, and the experience and erudition he has gained in doing so comes through in a subtle way as you continue listening. Sometimes with works like this, one starts to get the sneaking suspicion that the reader doesn’t really understand what he is reading, but in this case, the fact that he does do so shines through. |
|
|
September Video RecommendationHow to Use Anki to Learn Foreign Languages
|
|
|
|
You received this email because you are subscribed to The Alexander Arguelles Academy of Languages & Literatures.
We promise to write you sparingly, and provide only quality information. Please remember that you can unsubscribe at any time. 630 W. 168th St.
New York
New York
10032
United States of America
|
|
|
|
