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ABOUT ALEXANDER ARGUELLES
Last updated: 26 March 2010
Education and Experience
Educational Philosophy
Scale for Assessing Foreign Language Reading Abilities
Language Learning Biography
Education and Experience
I received my undergraduate education at Columbia University (B.A. 1986) and my graduate education at the University of Chicago (M.A. 1988, Ph.D. 1994). While an undergraduate I focused primarily upon 17th and 18th century French and German Classicism and I also studied Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. While a graduate student I focused primarily upon the entire developmental sequence of historic Germanic languages (writing my dissertation on Old Norse source materials for the conversion of Viking society to Christianity) as well as Old French epic literature.
From 1994-1996, I was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Berlin Center for Advanced German and European Research, a program sponsored by the German government (the Berlin Senate) to enable 10 American doctoral students and post-docs each year to do research in their fields in Europe so as to foster ties between academics on both sides of the Atlantic. As I investigated the ties between the mid-20th century National Socialist ideal of Germanentum and images of pre-Christian Germanic society based upon the etymological reconstructions of late 19th and early 20th century comparative
philology, my generous travel and research grant also enabled me to make living contact with contemporary Teutonic dialects such as Swedish and Dutch. After having studied many ancient and medieval literary languages I truly enjoyed learning living European languages while living in Europe, but this was not difficult enough so I decided to leave for the greatest linguistic challenge I could find, which I determined to be teaching myself Korean while living in Korea.
From 1996-2004, I was a professor at Handong University in South Korea. As director of foreign language education, I myself initiated the teaching of and developed the curricula for French, Spanish, and German programs in a 6-course 3-level sequence for each language. I was also responsible for overseeing and administering the programs in Chinese and Japanese, which were much larger (approximately 150 students began each Eastern language each year, while 30 began each Western language), as well as for hiring, training, and supervising all foreign language faculty in these 5 languages.
I also taught courses in general linguistics, comparative historical linguistics, the historical development of the English language, literary translation, and, based on my own developing techniques, on language acquisition methodologies and on the effective study of foreign languages. All these years I focused on learning Korean first and foremost and then on collaborating with Korean linguists to do joint research in such areas as verbal conjugation while at the same time I began to focus more upon Classical Chinese and on studying and translating Buddhist legendary material. After nearly a decade in the Far East, when I had succeeded in bringing my Korean skills to a respectably professional level, I decided to leave for the new challenge of mastering Arabic while living in the Middle East.
From 2004-2006, I was a professor at the American University of Science and Technology in Beirut, Lebanon. I was the chairman of the department of humanities and foreign languages, which had approximately 30 faculty members, and a primary liaison with the independent French-language educational section of the school. While there, I single-handedly designed and implemented a Great Books reading and discussion core curriculum for the whole institution of 4000+ students. I intended to stay there for a decade as well and was focusing upon mastering Modern Standard Arabic before moving on to the colloquial variants, but I was forced to leave abruptly and prematurely when bombs began to fall during the Israeli invasion of July 2006, and I thereupon returned to my homeland as a refugee.
From 2006-2008, I was a visiting professor at New College of California in San Francisco, where I taught Great Books courses in the Far Eastern and Middle Eastern traditions as well as a linguistics practicum on efficient language acquisition through self-study.
As of 2009, I have taken a position as a Language Specialist at the Regional Language Centre of the South East Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO RELC). Although I am based in Singapore, I lead intensive teacher training seminars in cities throughout the 11 nations in the organization. I am engaged in several formal research projects on the efficacy of my shadowing methodology and on motivation in self-improvement among language learners. Beginning in the summer of 2010, I will be offering courses here in intensive independent study skills development.
Educational Philosophy
I have taken the comparative and interdisciplinary nature of my own formation very much to heart and I truly believe that the Humanities can only be approached in a holistic fashion. I have never wanted to be anything but a scholar, and by that I do not mean merely an expert in some sub-field of fragmented knowledge, but rather someone who
studies all the time so as to build an encyclopedic mind. I am engaged upon a life-long quest for learning in the sense of continuously challenging myself to expand my horizons and the study of languages is my passport.
Scale for Assessing Foreign Language Reading Abilities
My main goal in studying foreign languages is to develop the ability to read the Great Books that have been written in them. The following scale shows how close I have come to my target of being able to access the classic literature and thought that has been expressed in each language listed. For this scale, I assume a base of 100% in my native English and derive the other percentage scores relative to this.
Scores in the 90's mean that I have truly attained my goal: I can read Great Books texts written in the language with approximately the same levels of understanding and appreciation of style that I have for texts written in English. Furthermore, my reading speed is not markedly slower, and I do not have to exert any conscious energy to remain focused for long periods of time. When listening to recorded books, a single take of the narrative suffices. With scores in the higher 90's I can dispense with a dictionary altogether, while with those in the lower 90's I still need to use one on occasion if I want to catch all minor descriptive details.
Scores in the 80's mean that I have attained my goal: I can read Great Books texts with high levels of appreciation and understanding. However, my reading speed is a bit slower than it is for the above category, and it requires some conscious energy to remain focused for longer periods of time. When listening to recorded books, a second take of the narrative can help me to catch things I may miss the first time. While I can follow the development of the plot or the argument without using a dictionary, I risk getting only the gist and missing the nuances, so I prefer to have one at hand. Nonetheless, when I can muster the time and mental dedication required to commit myself to a period of exclusive focus on a language in this range, simply reading extensively and intensively and thus seeing words in their context enables me to markedly increase my range of vocabulary more rapidly than if I were to stop repeatedly to look them all up.
For the sake of completing a useful scale, I will continue to describe levels of knowledge that represent both significant investments of time in learning and significant degrees of attainment of linguistic knowledge. However, on the chart that follows I will only list those languages for which I have attained at least 80%, as this to me represents a tangible cut off point: left alone for several hours with nothing but a literary or humanistic text in a language above this level and nothing to do but read it, I could engage it fruitfully the entire time; left alone for several hours with nothing but a text in a language below this level and nothing to do but read it, I would soon develop a headache of frustration.
Scores in the 70's mean that I have all but attained my goal: I can wrestle with Great Books in the original tongue of composition, but it is challenging and absolutely requires the assistance of both dictionaries and other reference works. Thus, I prefer to continue to build up towards my goal by working with annotated editions, simplified versions of these texts, or simpler works altogether such as short story collections rather than full novels, or by the use of crutches such as translations and bilingual texts. When listening to recorded books, multiple passes are both helpful and engaging, and initially it helps to read along with the text as well as listen to it.
Scores in the 60's mean that I am approaching my goal: I can attack the pages of Great Books, but the assault is both arduous and time-consuming. It was when I reached this level of attainment during the course of my own academic training that I was encouraged and expected to begin the task of laboriously hacking through classic texts. However, since then I have discovered that it is better to continue to build up to this by using advanced level readers and other prepared texts first and foremost, then turning to collections of tales and other easier forms of fiction or more transparent works such as histories whose content I already know relatively well. When listening to recorded books, it is profitable to hear the same narrative repeatedly, and initially to do so while simultaneously reading a translation of the work, and thereafter while reading the text in the original as I listen to the recording.
Scores in the 50's mean that my goal is not yet in sight: Great Books are out of reach, but I can begin reading introductory or intermediate general readers, children's stories, and other simple texts. I can enjoy repeatedly listening to a relatively lengthy recorded text while simultaneously reading a translation of it in order to rapidly increase my vocabulary and structural knowledge.
Scores in the 40's mean that while reading as a whole is still too difficult a task, I do have enough foundation to engage in the exercise of comparative textual analysis. I can enjoy repeatedly listening to short recorded texts while simultaneously reading translations of them in order to build my vocabulary and structural knowledge.
Scores in the 30's mean that I have studied the language thoroughly by working through numerous textbooks, courses, or methods, but have never gone any further than that. It may also mean that the language is quite similar to one that I know well already even though I have not studied it directly. In either case, if I ever aspire to read in it, while I might need some review or refresher, what I really require is not further study, but simply to make the commitment and begin the process.
Scores in the 20's mean that at some point in the past I built up a solid foundation in the language, but that this was long ago, and that I have most likely made a conscious decision to let it go.
Scores in the 10's mean that I have studied the language to an intermediate level at some point, but that if I ever want to begin to read in it, I must first engage in further and more advanced textbook grammatical and structural study.
Scores in the 01's mean that my knowledge of the language has never gone beyond the level of beginning study or a cursory comparative philological overview.
March 2010 Estimate of my Reading Abilities
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100
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English
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99
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German
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99
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French
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98
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Spanish
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95
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Italian
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95
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Dutch
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95
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Swedish
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94
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Old Norse
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94
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Middle High German
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94
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Old French
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93
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Portugese
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93
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Catalan
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93
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Latin
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92
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Norwegian (Nynorsk)
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92
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Norwegian (Bokmċl)
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92
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Danish
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92
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Middle English
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92
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Middle Dutch
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91
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Old English / Anglo-Saxon
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91
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(Old) Occitan
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91
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(Modern) Provençal
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90
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Icelandic
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90
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Old Swedish
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90
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Old High German
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90
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Afrikaans
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89
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Esperanto
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88
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Russian
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87
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Frisian
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86
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Romanian
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84
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Arabic MSA
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83
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Korean
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81
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Persian
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80
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Modern Greek
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Language Learning Biography
I would like to encourage and counsel those who wish to tread the path of the polyglot that if you can conceive of
learning a large number of languages or language families as a lifetime's intellectual engagement and you are willing
to work long, hard, and intelligently enough at doing so, you can succeed. Drive, discipline, countless hours of
systematic hard work, sustained interest and motivation, access to good materials and intelligent methods and
procedures for using them--if you have all these, there is no reason why you cannot achieve what I have achieved
or even more.
My father's father's father left Spain for Mexico, and my father's mother's parents left Germany for the United States,
so my father grew up in a multilingual environment, but my maternal ancestors all left the British Isles for America by
the early 18th century so my mother grew up in a monolingual household and consequently so did I. However, although
English was the only language used for communication in my family, it was not the only language I heard in my home,
for my father is a scholar and a polyglot who teaches himself languages by reading grammars and texts aloud, so I grew up
overhearing him do this. When I was very young we lived in Italy, and throughout my childhood we travelled and stayed abroad
in various parts of Europe, North Africa, and India. Our home was in a neighborhood in New York City where I
overheard great deals of Spanish. Thus, although I spoke only English as a child, I grew up knowing, naturally and
instinctively, that the world was full of different languages and that it was possible to know numbers of them because
you could teach them to yourself.
I began studying French when I was 11 years old because it was on the curriculum when I entered the 6th grade at that age.
I do not really recall any details of the experience, but I must have learned something because I do remember being able
to use the language to successfully leave England on my own and navigate my way across the channel and onto a train to meet
my parents in Paris when I was 13. However, I cannot have learned as much as I should have because when I was 14 I moved
to Berkeley, California, where the school administrators, seeing that I had had and done well in three years of French,
placed me in a fourth year class. As it turned out, the students in that district had learned far more than I had, so I
was way over my head and did quite poorly at first. I wanted to drop it altogether, but my father refused to let me do so.
I really struggled for a while, and although I eventually caught up, French was my weakest subject throughout high-school
and when I got to college, after seven years of instruction in the language, I was only able to place into the
second year sequence of a seriously structured course of study.
I have been a Teutophile for as long as I can remember, and during my adolescence Hermann Broch, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka,
Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil were among my favorite authors while Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer were my
favorite philosophers, so at about the age of 15 I conceived a burning desire to learn German. However, it was not offered
at my school, and I do not know if it was simply because I had yet to develop the discipline or because at that stage my
father's example was still more intimidating than inspiring, but it simply did not occur to me to try to teach it to myself.
In my final year of high-school I placed into a program whereby I took classes at the University of California, Berkeley
instead of at Berkeley High, with the understanding that these credits would count as my freshman year of college if I
stayed on at Berkeley, whereas they would transfer as senior year of high-school credits if I matriculated elsewhere.
Among the first classes I took was a quarter of Latin, but it was taught by an overtaxed graduate student to a huge
group of undergraduates who met only twice a week, and I learned nothing.
I chose to attend Columbia University because I was attracted to its Great Books core curriculum and because I wished to
return to New York City, so I received my undergraduate formation there from 1982-1986. At the beginning of my first
semester I was pleased to discover that languages were taught particularly well and seriously there: classes met every
single day, the number of students was small, and the teachers were enthusiastic. Under those circumstances, my French
at long last really took root and everything that had been nebulous and opaque for years suddenly gelled and became
coherent and clear. I was also simultaneously able to satisfy my longstanding desire to begin the study of German,
in which I soon began to flourish.
If there was any problem with the language program as I experienced it that first year, then it was with the language
laboratory. There was one, a standard such installation with individual listening booths that provide only a modicum of
sound proofing but a great deal of visual isolation. The recorded materials from both textbooks were available for
listening there, but although I was told about this option, I was not given any indication about how to listen or
what I was to do while there. Although I felt a natural inclination to imitate aloud what I was listening
to, and although the presence of microphones and recording capacity clearly indicated that this was the design and purpose
of the place, hardly any other students did so, and those who did were often so loud as to be intrusive; consequently,
as I am by nature self-conscious about disturbing others, by going there to listen, I was actively inhibited from speaking.
I know for a fact that few of my classmates ever went there because one day I noticed an announcement in the office for an
opening for a student lab attendant and, having obtained the position, I ended up spending several hours a day there
and so observed that it was a generally unpopular, sparsely attended facility. Indeed, one of my duties was to wake
other students and gently remind them of the no-sleeping policy. Still, I enjoyed working there more than I did patronizing
the place because, alone in the office, I was free to listen to the recordings of all the different languages that were
offered, which I enjoyed doing just to hear their rhythms. Reflecting upon this, I suppose the genesis of my shadowing
technique was a reaction against the stifling nature of the laboratory manifested in a desire to make listening and
imitating more dynamic and to bring languages alive by taking the learning process outside.
Columbia's core curriculum is purposely designed to fill the first two years of study, and although four semesters of
one foreign language are an integral part of the program, as I was taking two languages, I already had an usually heavy
course load. Thus, I was not allowed to register for a third language at the beginning of my sophomore year. This fact
pushed me to do something that I had already been contemplating, namely to finally emulate what I had so often seen my
father do and to teach myself a language. While I was reveling in my studies of German, and while I had noticed that one
year of focused and intelligent study could bring as much progress as seven years of diffuse instruction, I nonetheless
felt that the pace of progress could still be more challenging. Thus, I undertook to teach myself Spanish to see if I
could not do better learning on my own. I resolved to rise before dawn every morning and to spend the first hour of the
day systematically working through N. Scarlyn Wilson's Spanish, a World War II vintage course in the older
Teach Yourself Series, which I recall most fondly as being a meticulously thorough and straightforward grammar translation
method. I worked through the book from start to finish within a few months, at which point I felt my Spanish to be pretty
much on par with my German. I had settled on Spanish because one can hear and see it everywhere in New York City, and during
those few months of exposure to crystal clear grammatical explanations and exercises, it was as if wax was melting out of
my ears, and every single day, as I walked around, I understood more and more of what I overheard around me.
This experience with Spanish convinced me that I could learn modern living languages more efficiently by studying on my
own than by taking classes in them. However, my brief encounter with Latin at Berkeley had left me with the impression
that older languages were more complex, and hence more interesting, and thus I felt an active desire to study them formally.
Indeed, as my junior year approached, so did the need to declare a major. I had long since decided that I wanted to
become a comparative historical philologist, though sadly that discipline no longer exists independently but has been
subsumed into linguistics, which is a very far cry from it. Linguistics has next to nothing to do with foreign languages,
whereas, examining an old program of study for a major in philology from decades past, I saw that it consisted mainly
of the rationally sequential study of a good number of ancient languages. Since I could not officially major in philology,
I resolved to learn the material anyway while majoring in a related area that would allow me to study the greatest possible
number of languages. Thus, I declared a double major in French and German and spent most of the next two years reading
literature in those two languages, while I used my elective credits to study Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. I studied
each of these languages in the same fashion: one semester of intensive grammatical study using, respectively, Wheelock's
Latin, Hansen and Quinn's Greek, and Coulson's Sanskrit, followed by subsequent semesters plunged
directly into unexpurgated if highly annotated editions of Cicero's orations, Plato's dialogues, and Lanman's Sanskrit
Reader. Apart from this, I honed my Spanish slowly by constant listening and occasional conversation, and at the
beginning of every semester, as I shopped around for classes, although I knew I would not be able to continue with them just
then, I could not resist sitting in on the likes of Chinese, Russian, and Hindi for a few days, just to see what they
might be like.
Thus, by the time I graduated at age 22, I had obtained a solid foundation in six languages: French, German, Spanish,
Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. My French and my German were probably at about the same level, while my Spanish would have
been a notch below them for lack of the amount of reading practice offered by my major. As for Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit,
I had not learned to read them in the same fashion as modern languages, for rather than consuming chapters at a time for
appreciation of the argument and understanding of the unfolding storyline, I had been trained to spend hours on a single
paragraph, looking up every word in a glossary and checking every construction in an exhaustive reference grammar, parsing
almost for the sake of parsing. I have subsequently found more efficacious ways of getting at these tongues, but at the
time I knew no better, and I not only got a firm foundation in them by doing this, but I enjoyed the process enormously,
particularly as I naturally improved with practice and was soon reading longer and longer passages with greater and greater
ease.
Indeed, I evaluate my entire language learning experience at Columbia as thoroughly positive. It is often claimed that
you cannot learn a language by studying the grammar, and sometimes the very notion of teaching languages in school is attacked,
and I can offer my high school and UC Berkeley learning experiences in support of these charges. However, I can also
offer my Columbia experience as a vindication of time-tested traditional grammar-based language teaching integrated into a
formal educational process. The difference between my secondary and collegiate experience lies not so much in the method,
but in the application: in the former case, classes were large and met infrequently, while in the latter, they were
small and met every day. Thus, under the right circumstances, and for a properly trained mind, this approach to language
learning can work very well indeed, and it is wrong to dismiss it out of hand as is so commonly done.
From reading the works of the seminal figures in 19th century comparative philology, I knew that many of them had also
simultaneously been founding fathers of comparative mythology, for in their day knowledge was less fragmented into
disparate disciplines. I also knew that their linguistic breadth has supposedly lingered longer in the academic field of
the comparative history of religions, as comparative mythology is now known, than it has in linguistics proper or even in
comparative literature. Thus, when the time came to move on to graduate school, I elected to earn my doctorate in the
comparative history of religions from the University of Chicago, and so I studied there from 1986-1994.
During my eight years there I was indeed able to expand my linguistic repertoire more widely than I believe I would have
been able to do in just about any other program in any other institution, but I was not able to do so nearly as much as I
hoped, expected, and desired. While at Columbia, the only obstacle I ever met to officially expanding my circle of languages
had been the finite number of credit hours remaining to me after fulfilling my major requirements. I obviously had to run my
choice of courses by my advisors each semester, and I simply cannot remember any of them ever saying anything about the
number of different languages I was studying. At Chicago, however, I almost immediately ran into a critical attitude that,
while rarely overtly articulated, was certainly firmly entrenched and manifested itself in many ways. According to this
attitude, it is simply not possible to learn many different languages, and it is wrong to even try because you should be
focused upon developing a specialist's expertise in one and only one area, and furthermore there is no real point in
trying because languages are ultimately not very important - they are just tools for getting at material, and what
really matters is the justification for the methodological theory with which you analyze that material and the
originality of the hermeneutic argument that you build upon that theory.
The first or master's degree year of the program that I was in was structured around courses that prepared you to pass
certifying exams to continue on for the doctorate. As I was able to test out of most of these requirements upon entrance,
I believed I would be free to study whatever I pleased with the credit hours I had liberated. Thus, my first quarter there,
I sat in on various language classes and, captivated by both Persian and Old French, I registered for these and spent
several weeks enraptured in their study before I was summoned to my advisor's office. He asked me why I was taking Persian.
My failure to give an acceptable answer is one of the great "what if" moments of my life. If I had answered in the jargon
that I was soon to learn that I was doing so in order to form a basis for comparative studies in the development of Indo-
European mythology, I would probably have been able to continue with the course. As it was, I answered that I wished to
be a polyglot philologist and to learn as many languages as I could, as well as I could, and that I was enjoying Persian
because it was fascinating and different. He shook his head and told me not to speak that way because, if I did, no one
would ever take me seriously as a scholar. He then informed me that I was not in college anymore, but in graduate school,
and that the purpose of my training was not to expand my horizons but rather to narrow them so that I could develop focused
expertise in some highly defined area of specialization. With the best of intentions for my intellectual development, he
continued to admonish me with the full-scale critical attitude described above.
I was still reeling when he then asked why I was taking Old French. Somehow, however, I was able to muster the presence
of mind to give an acceptable answer. On my entrance essay I had written that I was interested in the conversion of
pre-Christian pagan traditions to medieval Christianity, and in particular in the way that the old myths, symbols, and
legends were preserved and reflected in the literature of the new culture. Thus, I said that I was studying Old French along
these very lines, and added that as I already knew both the old form of the language (Latin) and the new (French), I
wanted to know the middle phrase as well so as to understand how the development of the language itself affected the
presentation. This passed muster, although if he had asked me this question first, I would probably have answered that I
had always enjoyed the Arthurian epic tradition, particularly as I had read it in modernized French, and that I now wanted
to take the opportunity to learn to read it in the original, and he would probably have made me drop this as well.
The Persian teacher was a scholar whose name I would later come to recognize as being quite prominent in Iranian studies,
and he was a kind man who called me several days after I stopped attending the class to find out what was wrong. As it turns
out, Persian is one of the languages that is nearest and dearest to my heart, and although I have developed a substantial
ability to read it through self-study, I have never had the occasion to learn to speak it. Truly, if that conversation with
my advisor had gone differently, my entire career could have taken a very different turn.
As it was, since I had gotten the message that I would be officially allowed to study medieval languages as an adjunct
to my program in the history of religions, that is what I did for the next few years. Although I began with Old French,
it was in the historical development of the Germanic family that I got the firmest grounding. I took a sequence of courses
in the "Old" phase proper - Gothic, Old High German, and Old English. Thereafter, using the same methodology, I taught
myself the "Middle" phase - Middle High German, Middle English, etc. - at first in consultation with the professor,
then on my own two feet. As for Old Norse, the classical language of the North, I learned this is the idyllic circumstances
of several quarters' worth of semi-private tutorials during which one other student and I met frequently in the professor's
office. As Old Norse has the most source material, I naturally spent the most time immersed in it, ultimately developing
the true reading fluency necessary to write my dissertation upon it.
Thus, I spent my early twenties immersed in Germanic philology, and throughout the course-taking first portion of my
graduate education, most of my credit hours were in older Teutonic tongues. When I was about 25, I completed this portion
of the program and entered the next phase, which was to spend several years becoming intimately familiar with the content
of the books on five extensive reading lists so that I could sit for qualifying essay exams analyzing them all prior to
being admitted to the dissertation stage proper. Because I had not yet developed the disciplined ability to balance a
number of different long-term learning projects, I felt a need to give myself over entirely to this task, which meant that
I had to leave off the substantive study of languages in order to concentrate upon reading theory. Although I stuck to my
resolution, I missed studying languages terribly, and so it was at this point that I fully and consciously resolved to
become a polyglot in the future. Although I had not time to use them then, I began acquiring grammars, manuals, and tapes
in a systematic fashion so as to build a language learning center for my future studies.
Between the ages of 28 and 30 I was occupied with researching and writing my dissertation, so I still had no time to study
any more new languages. However, this involved first and foremost a long and deep immersion in Old Norse with comparative
excursions into many of the other Germanic dialects I had already studied. Apart from that, as I was involved in medieval
history, I had ample occasion to use my Latin, and both French and German proved invaluable as general research languages,
opening many doors that would otherwise have been closed to me. It was at about this stage in my life, too, that I began to
listen to language tapes in various languages as I took my daily dawn runs along the shores of Lake Michigan. I had
discovered that the main branch of the Chicago Public Library had a very large selection of audio materials in a very wide
variety of languages, so this presented me with a wonderful opportunity to both gain an idea of what many new languages
sounded like and to gain needed listening practice in French, German, and Spanish. I also discovered that other Germanic
and Romance languages were more or less transparent, and I found it fascinating to try to figure out how much I could
understand of them by means of repeated listening alone, and in this fashion developed a real ability to follow didactic
narratives in both Italian and Dutch.
As I used neither my Greek nor my Sanskrit during my time in Chicago, my knowledge of these languages went dormant.
My Spanish, however, continued to grow independently of all of the above considerations regarding the various stages of my
formal program of studies. Although Chicago has its Hispanic neighborhoods, the university is not located in one, and so
I no longer heard it on the streets every day. However, the graduate dormitory where I lived was a veritable international
house, and there were almost always some Spanish speakers with whom I could practice. I had a longstanding circle of
Chilean acquaintances, and, above all, a very good Mexican friend with whom I could converse frequently. Indeed, I spent
a month one summer living with his family in Mexico City, and some years later I spent another six weeks in South America,
doing home stay and intensive one-on-one tutorials in language schools in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Back in Chicago itself,
I was somehow always able to continue studying Spanish, again regardless of what I was doing towards my doctorate, which
gave me the first taste of the kind of balanced discipline I would need to develop in greater measure in the future. I was all
too aware of my imperfections and patterns of error in my conversations with my friends despite my theoretical grasp of the
grammar, and I was able to make systematic improvement in this regard by working assiduously through the Foreign Service
Institute pattern drill courses over the years.
From 1994 to 1996, when I was between the ages of 30 and 32, I held a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Berlin Center
for Advanced German and European Research. My research grant was to enable me to continue to investigate historical Germanic
philology in-depth, though now with as much focus upon the etymological interpretations of relatively contemporary German
philologists as upon the older languages proper. As assiduously as I worked upon this project, I initially spent far more
energy consciously, deliberately, and systematically improving and polishing my own modern German. To this end, I consciously
banished English from my brain as soon as I boarded the airplane to fly abroad and made German my mental operating system.
The entire time I was there, I avoided thinking in English altogether and speaking it as much as possible, such that, even
several years after I had moved on, I continued to think automatically in German. Initially, in every conversation I had,
I paid close and conscious attention to how my speech differed from that of the natives. I asked my acquaintances to correct
every mistake I made, and I did as much self correction as I could when talking to strangers. I carried a dictionary
and a notepad with me, wrote down and looked up all new words and expressions that I encountered, and made a point of
actively using them myself until they became familiar. I read voraciously, and in doing my research in restricted archives
and rare book rooms of libraries, I transcribed hundreds of pages of German myself rather than making photocopies. I worked
systematically through advanced books of grammatical exercises. Finally, I met with a professional phonetician on a weekly
basis so as to improve my accent. Although I naturally continued to make overall progress for the entire two years, after
about six months of this hard effort, I noticed that I had come to a plateau in the learning curve where conscious effort
ceased to pay returns, and I began to simply live in this language while turning my learning endeavors towards other
languages.
I had a very generous travel grant, and so although I was based in Germany, I was able to spend weeks at a time in many
other countries as well. Thus I went all over Europe, not only doing philological research in archives, but also collecting
materials for language study from bookstores and language laboratories all over the continent. As I did this, just as I had
become adept at quickly learning to read yet other historical languages after I had worked hard at learning my first handful,
so now I found that living speech forms generally regarded as different languages altogether seemed quite transparent to me,
more like dialectical variations upon themes that I already knew rather than as distinct new entities that I would have to
learn from scratch. Indeed, because of my strong philological background, I found that I had so much to transfer from the
languages that I already knew well that when I was able to spend a few weeks immersed in other related languages, this was
sufficient to develop a respectable degree of overall functional proficiency in them. I first made this discovery with
Swedish. When I first went to Sweden, I had never studied the language in any way, shape, or form, but when I heard it
spoken all around me, I understood a great deal - the more so the more attention I paid to it, as and it struck me as a
recombination of elements from Old Norse, German, and English. After three weeks immersed in it, studying it consciously
and actively the whole time, I was able to hold my own in a complex and meaningful conversation. Key to this was not merely
studying hard but also developing a new gregarious and garrulous personality who sought out and created conversational
opportunities from which my normal retiring self would have fled. With Dutch and then Italian, this took only about two
weeks each, and correspondingly less conscious effort, perhaps due to my increasing experience, perhaps due also to the
fact that I had already gained a certain amount of passive listening practice with them back in Chicago. While I
certainly did not master any of these languages, I gained the impression that polishing them would be more a question of
months than of years - that if I could stay and do for them what I had just done for German, I could rise almost
effortlessly to the same level that it had taken me 14 years to attain in German itself.
This was a wonderful and fascinating learning experience, but it was all too easy, and I began to crave a real linguistic
challenge. I wanted to see if I could learn an extremely difficult language while living in a totally different culture.
Thus, although I had a number of opportunities to stay on in Europe or to return to America, I decided instead to seek out
the occasion to move to East Asia. I knew that East Asian languages are generally the hardest to master for Westerners,
and although I intended to study both Japanese and Chinese as well in a comparative context, I wished to begin with Korean
because I had read in a Foreign Service Institute report that it was the most demanding of them all.
In order to achieve this, I applied for professorships at a number of Korean universities and so obtained a faculty position
at Handong University on the eastern coast of the country. This institution had only been founded the year before, and its
school of international studies, languages, and literature was seeking somebody to develop and lead a foreign language
program comprising French, Spanish, and German. It sounded like a dream job, and in many ways it was. New York, Chicago,
and Berlin had all been too full of distractions and other responsibilities and requirements to allow me to focus entirely
upon serious language study. Handong, by contrast, was exactly what I needed for this, for the campus was on an isolated
hill amidst pine and bamboo forests and rice fields with a view of the Pacific Ocean from my back porch. Furthermore, it
soon became clear that, while the university was recruiting foreign faculty to give it international stature, we were
viewed as outsiders and thus completely shut out of the administrative decision making process. Most other people found
this intolerable and soon left, but I turned the situation on its head by reasoning that as my sole duty was to teach
languages, I could devote myself entirely to their study on my own.
It was in the period 1996-2001, when I was between the ages of 32 and 37, that I finally truly achieved my dream of being
able to study in a focused and protracted fashion to turn myself into a polyglot by learning as many languages as I could,
as well as I could. Initially, of course, I focused on Korean and, after I got grounded, on Classical Chinese and Japanese
in a comparative context. However, I also ranged very widely through the whole world of languages. I had a decent salary
and no debts or real expenses, so I was able to order grammars, dictionaries, and tapes for the study of absolutely
everything that I could find and thus I collected a personal language resource center that now contains materials for the
study over 150 different languages. Although I could not get to all of these, when I received them I went through them with
the goal of learning at least something about at least one language of each representative type or from each language family.
As a product of Western civilization, I cannot help but draw a fundamental line between the way I can relate to European
Indo-European languages on the one hand and all other "Exotica" on the other. In the first case, in this period I not
only strove to keep up all the languages I had already studied, but I tried to get an overview of all the Germanic and
Romance dialects that I had not yet examined, and I also began to explore the Celtic and Slavic families as well as Modern
Greek. In the second case, I began the study of many languages in which I never got very far (Euskara, Finnish, Shona, Zulu,
Ancient Egyptian, Quechua, and Malay-Indonesian spring to mind most immediately now), as well as others that I covered quite
systematically before abandoning them for years (Swahili and Turkish), others that I have never abandoned even if I have not
always been able to give them regular care (Hindi-Urdu), and yet others that have been my near daily companions ever since
(Arabic and Persian).
In order to do this, I led a monastic existence, obsessively studying languages all day, every day. Of my 18 waking hours,
I managed to devote at least 16 to linguistic pursuits throughout this period. How was I able to sustain the momentum to
study with such intensity? To begin with, the nature of my job greatly facilitated this degree of immersion. Teaching foreign
languages, at least for the first few years, was a continuous language learning experience in itself, and the essence of my
research activities also involved the in-depth study of Korean, so I could count most of my working time as study time as
well. Furthermore, I was still a bachelor, living in an isolated rural environment, so I had no external demands upon my
time. Because of this, I was swiftly able to discover and adhere to what I regard as my natural sleep cycle, which is to
go down with the sun and wake up six hours later. The exact time varies with the seasons, but given that this is basically
from 8:00 PM to 2:00 AM, this was not something I was ever able to do as a normal socially active adult. However, in my
relative isolation, I found that when I kept a strictly regular schedule based around these hours, I was able to remain
completely focused and alert throughout my entire waking day.
...to be continued and brought up to date when I have a bit more time and perspective to reflect upon where I have been and what I have done...
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