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This month we will begin our exploration of Tacitus' Annals and Histories in the Great Books of the West seminar. Join us to read and discuss this essential part of the Western Canon. Enrollment is ongoing. More information can be found on the Academy website.
We are also thrilled to announce a brand new Sanskrit course, more details below.
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Musings From The Professor's Desk
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Hello once again!
And thank you once again for subscribing to my newsletter. I hope you will enjoy this second installment of my monthly column as well as a testimonial about the academy from a student. There are also announcements about what we will be reading next in our Great Books course, as well as about a new guided self-study Sanskrit offering that students have requested. Both of these will begin next week, so if you know someone who might be interested in them, please forward this newsletter on to them straight away.
Last month I shared some thoughts with you about language learning dreams and dreaming, and in this month of May – which marks the first anniversary of the academy! – I would like to continue upon a variation of that theme.
I first publicly posted my vision for an independent academy almost twenty years ago in articles on the old How-to-Learn-Any-Language forum and then more fully described the kind of ideal curriculum and systematic training it might provide on my old website.
Although I found my career as a university professor to be fulfilling, I longed for an atmosphere where I could give far more of myself to my students by teaching a wider variety of languages and literatures, as well as to have students who were motivated more by a pure desire for continuous lifelong learning than by a need to get through a program in order to obtain a degree within a set time frame. Having envisioned this, I went further to imagine an atmosphere largely free of administrative tasks and of the need to participate in academic politics.
All of that seemed so ideal that it felt like a dream in the sense of something that one hopes for and enjoys contemplating, but does not ever really expect to achieve. Thus, for years I never acted on actualizing it, and might have come to regard those posts and articles as simple stories that I once wrote but for the fact that those who read them not infrequently asked me when I would do this.
Still, I never took steps towards it because I always conceived that it would need to be a brick and mortar institution, and I would not even know how to begin organizing such an endeavor. Over the years, people frequently told me that I could and should do it virtually, but based on my prior experience with that format, I did not believe this. Then came 2020, and the form of delivery and interaction via Zoom that grew out of that was a game changer. A reading and discussion course for German literature that I developed then not only worked just as well as an in-person meeting, but enabled those people to gather together from many different locations.
Once I realized that this could work, my dream of an independent academy ceased to be a vague hope. I took the plunge and began actively planning for it, getting organized, working out the logistics, and having the website built. A year ago, it was ready, and so in May of 2022, the academy opened its virtual doors.
I can honestly say that this past year has seen my dream come true. I finally feel able to offer my full self as a scholar to my students rather than only a single slice of me at a time. And the students that the academy has attracted correspond amazingly well with the ideal conception I had of people motivated by an unquenchable thirst for lifelong learning. It has been a privilege getting to know you and to help you upon your journeys. I am enormously grateful to everyone who has participated in realizing this dream over the past year. Thank you all very much!
I look forward to the development of the Academy in its second year and beyond. I honestly believe that we are in the vanguard of an educational revolution. There is certainly plenty of room for growth. Please join a session if you are not already in one, and encourage others to do so as well!
Now that I am actualizing my lifelong dream, a voice inside my head sometimes wonders whether I could and should have done this sooner. I don’t think so. The circumstances had to be right, and I had to be watching for them. So that is my advice to you: visualize your ideals, flesh them out, and share them with others. However Quixotic they might be, if you do not articulate them, they definitely won’t ever happen; but if you do, then, like the Academy, they just might when the time is right.
With best regards,
Alexander Arguelles
P.S. Currently very few people know about the existence of our newsletter. If you are able to, please share the following link with anyone who may be interested in subscribing: alexanderarguelles.com/newsletter/
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Meet Adam Shuttleworth
Internal auditor, pianist, and a language learning enthusiast. Interested in languages ever since his first French lesson at school at the age of 9, Adam studied Latin and Greek in his teens. He speaks French, Italian and German, and is currently learning Russian and Hindi. |
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“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.”
Additional student accounts can be found on the Academy website under Testimonials. |
TUESDAYS AT 12:00 CDT (Chicago). Next week, upon student demand, we will begin a new guided self-study course in Sanskrit. In our weekly meeting, I will explain concepts, answer questions, correct exercises and translations, set the pace, and in general guide you in teaching yourselves how to teach yourselves languages (rather than simply teaching them to you). While each student is responsible for studying on his or her own, they will also use the Academy network in order to study together and keep each other accountable. The first few weeks will be a Scriptorium tutorial as we will concentrate upon learning to read and write the Devanagari alphabet as an independent system, i.e., without the use of Romanization. As you may know from the video tour of my language laboratory, I have multiple resources for learning Sanskrit, and from them we will choose the best textbook suited to the particular needs and interests of those who sign up for the course. |
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Next week, in Great Books of the West, we will be moving on to the Annals and then the Histories of Tacitus. These are detailed eye witness accounts of the first decades of the Roman Empire, showing how an effective administration can function despite the often insane excesses of those at the very top of the system. Tacitus is considered to be a great stylist in Latin, so even in English translation you may find this to be a thrilling account if you read it on your own. If you can join us to discuss it, so much the better! It is a relatively short work, so we will finish it by mid-July. We will then move on to read the volumes of ancient literature in the series, i.e., the Greek dramas and the epic poems of Homer and Virgil. |
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May Video RecommendationWhat Language(s) am I Learning Now/Next?
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