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Musings From The Professor's Desk
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Dear Readers,
We will shortly be releasing a poll to gauge interest in possible new offerings for 1st Quarter 2024. Therefore, I would like to use this month’s newsletter to describe some of the possible new courses that are being considered so far:
1) An Italian literature reading and discussion circle to parallel those in French, German, and Spanish. Some have expressed interest in beginning in the Middle Ages with Dante, others have resonated to my suggestion that we focus on Umberto Eco, alternating between his novels and his essays.
2) A guided self-study circle in some sort of Greek: perhaps a diachronic overview; perhaps Koine with the goal of forming a NT reading and discussion group, both in the original; perhaps ancient with a collective goal of learning to speak and think in it, not just read and analyze it.
3) Intensive circles in developing reading abilities in Persian and/or Hindi using handwritten interlinear texts that I made myself when studying these languages intensively years back. I will provide you with a manuscript and guide you through my handwriting when necessary as we read through these together.
4) A Korean language course that would be more like a regular class than many of the other circles. Our first textbook would be the one I co-authored with Kim Jong-Rok, A Historical, Literary, and Cultural Approach to the Korean Language. Instead of meeting just once a week, this class would meet twice, once with me for reading, grammar, and analysis, once with my wife, certified and experienced in Korean language instruction, for phonetic training and speaking practice with a native teacher.
5) A circle or circles devoted to language tours, involving short term exploration of systematic sequences of languages, comparing and contrasting them as we examine their distinctive features through looking at short texts in them. These will be similar to the video series that I made about the Germanic language branch. Indeed, we could have one section of this for the Germanic branch, another for the Romance branch, and a third that explored the entire IE family more widely.
6) Beyond these new considerations, many of the existing cohorts in Old Norse, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Latin will be advancing to the next level in reading, so those with prior experience elsewhere might consider joining them at this point.
7) Alternatively, perhaps there might be interest in running another cohort of one of our existing offerings, and there will be room on the poll for you to indicate circles that you might like to see offered again.
8) Finally, perhaps you might have some suggestions of your own for courses that you would like to have developed and run, and the poll will enable you to offer these. I am happy to note that many of our current offerings already were not my own idea for a course, but rather the suggestion of the participants.
9) Last but not least, in addition to all of the above virtual offerings, I would like to consider holding some sort of in-person workshop or retreat during one of the break weeks next year, and options for this will also be considered in the poll.
I look forward to your active participation in this poll so that we can make the best choice of offerings for 2024.
With best regards,
Alexander Arguelles
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Meet Nicholas PreuthBA in Philosophy & French Language and Literature – University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Nick currently works as the Assistant Manager of a social media team which manages the French & English Canadian accounts of an automobile company. Future plans include pursuing a JD and possibly a PhD in Philosophy. Nick is fluent in French and Danish; conversational in German, Spanish, and Portuguese; and is finding time to incorporate Latin. Nick also has Narcolepsy — a chronic neurological condition which impairs the brain’s ability to regulate the sleep-wake cycle, causing sudden attacks of involuntary sleep.
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“My very first experience with languages was as a kid when, ironically enough, I struggled to even speak one. Perhaps it was due to being born prematurely as an identical twin, or maybe it was just a mere incident of nature, but my parents had to place me into speech therapy from a young age because I struggled with English’s phonology. By the end of elementary school, I had mastered all but one sound in English: the infamous labialized voiced postalveolar approximant, i.e., the American English R. After another five years of intensive work incessantly repeating drills which made me fit to sail the High Seas — ARRRRRRRRRed; ARRRRRRRRRed — they finally discharged me as having mastered the sound enough to blend in, although still to this day I’ve been known to slip up.
While I’d be remiss to not acknowledge that speech therapy certainly instilled in me a decent amount of patience for onerous tasks, which has proven useful in picking up new phonetic inventories, the main point of that story is simply to dispel the notion that polyglots or aspiring polyglots need to have some kind of preternatural affinity or proclivity for language acquisition. I certainly didn’t — my language learning journey was more of a drunken stumble than a clearly demarcated path. I started French in high school and just never stopped, picked up Danish after a 4-month exchange, studying philosophy in Copenhagen, then German got tacked on when I needed an excuse to remain a full-time student while completing my philosophy honors thesis during my last semester of college, and so on and so forth. I’ve never particularly excelled at learning languages, especially since I’m prone to falling asleep while reading due to my Narcolepsy. The trick is, I just never stopped.
Over the years, I’ve seen too many people give up on language learning after expressing profound discontent that they are incapable because they aren’t smart enough, or they’re not good at grammar, etc., when in reality, they just need to modify their learning methods and revitalize their motivation. And that’s exactly Professor Arguelles’ expertise. In his Path of the Polyglot course, which I’ve attended for a year now, Prof. Arguelles lectures on the methodologies he’s employed to successfully learn numerous languages; I can personally testify to their veracity, having used them myself to reach a fairly confident level of conversational Portuguese in only four months. I was also briefly part of the French Reading Circle, where the focus on reading aloud and subsequent discussion of the literature redefined how I approached improving my advanced level languages, and even led to me purchasing Emile Zola’s complete collection of Les Rougon-Macquart to work through slowly. At the end of the day, we ought to do away with the notion of polyglottery as the hobby of the savant. Language learners are a diverse group of people, and you won’t find a more welcoming, friendly, and supportive community of language learners than the one found here at the Academy.”
Additional student accounts can be found on the Academy website under Testimonials. |
November Book Recommendation
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Last month I recommended Umberto Eco’s Il Nome della Rosa (The Name of the Rose). In the hopes that you might have read and enjoyed it, this month I would like to recommend his other medieval novel, Baudolino, for many of the same reasons. I have also read and reread this book multiple times over the course of my life and I often quote or refer to it. It is perhaps not as philosophically dense as his first book, but just as historically and culturally rich as Eco brings the Middle Ages to life on a large and broad scale ranging from Europe into Asia. Participants in the academy who are taking multiple circles will likely find that this book ties threads between them together. Again, as mentioned above and before, I hope to have an Italian literature circle in 2024, so we can read this in the original together all the sooner if you read it in translation now.
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November Video RecommendationLearning in Motion = Polysthenics |
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