Alexander Arguelles is an American

Americans

The people of the United States, also known as simply Americans or American people, are the inhabitants or citizens of the United States. The United States is a multi-ethnic nation, home to people of different ethnic and national backgrounds...

 scholar of foreign language

Foreign language

A foreign language is a language indigenous to another country. It is also a language not spoken in the native country of the person referred to, i.e. an English speaker living in Japan can say that Japanese is a foreign language to him or her...

s. He is notable not only for his achievements as a polyglot

Polyglot

Polyglot may refer to:*Polyglot , someone who uses many languages*Polyglot , a book that contains the same text in more than one language*Polyglot , a computer program that is valid in more than one programming language...

, but also for the advice and information about autodidactic language study that he provides to language learners on web forums.

Background

Professor Arguelles holds a BA (1986) from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 and a Ph.D. (1994) from the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

, where he worked with both Ioan Culianu and Wendy Doniger

Wendy Doniger

Wendy Doniger is an American Indologist and Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the Committee on Social Thought...

. He was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin and has been a professor at Handong Global University

Handong Global University

Handong Global University is a privately run, four-year university located in Pohang, North Gyeongsang province, South Korea.- Overview :...

 in South Korea, the American University of Science & Technology in Beirut

Beirut

Beirut is the capital and largest city of Lebanon, with a population ranging from 1 million to more than 2 million . Located on a peninsula at the midpoint of Lebanon's Mediterranean coastline, it serves as the country's largest and main seaport, and also forms the Beirut Metropolitan...

 and the New College of California

New College of California

New College of California was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1971 by former Gonzaga University President, Father John Leary. After 37 years, it ceased operations in early 2008....

 in San Francisco. He currently works in Singapore

Singapore

Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...

 as a language specialist in the training, research, assessment, and consultancy division of the applied linguistics department of the Regional Language Centre of the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO-RELC).

Polyglottery

Together with other known polyglots as Emil Krebs

Emil Krebs

Emil Krebs was a German polyglot and sinologist. He mastered 68 languages in speech and writing and studied 120 other languages.-The early years:...

, Harold Williams, and Kató Lomb

Kató Lomb

Kató Lomb was a Hungarian interpreter, translator, language genius and one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world....

, Arguelles has proven that it is possible to learn multiple languages to meaningfully high levels.

Professor Arguelles' foreign language learning process takes place in three fashions: formal study, immersion, and autodidactic study. As a university student, he took classes in French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

, German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

, Latin, Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

, Sanskrit

Sanskrit

Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

, Medieval French, Gothic

Gothic language

Gothic is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizable Text corpus...

, Old High German

Old High German

The term Old High German refers to the earliest stage of the German language and it conventionally covers the period from around 500 to 1050. Coherent written texts do not appear until the second half of the 8th century, and some treat the period before 750 as 'prehistoric' and date the start of...

, and Old Norse

Old Norse

Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....

. He claims to have developed conversational abilities in Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

, Swedish

Swedish language

Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

, Dutch

Dutch language

Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...

, and Italian

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

 during visits to those countries while doing research in Europe, Portuguese

Portuguese language

Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

 by conversing with a Brazilian student, and Korean

Korean language

Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...

 and Arabic

Arabic language

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

 during his years of residence in South Korea and Lebanon. During the first portion of his time in Korea, he also engaged in the intensive simultaneous autodidactic study of a wide range of languages including Irish

Irish language

Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...

, Persian

Persian language

Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...

, Hindi

Hindi

Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...

, Turkish

Turkish language

Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...

, and Swahili

Swahili language

Swahili or Kiswahili is a Bantu language spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Mozambique Channel coastline from northern Kenya to northern Mozambique, including the Comoro Islands. It is also spoken by ethnic minority groups in Somalia...

. As of about the year 2000, instead of continuing to study new languages, he has focused upon developing greater depth in a number of those he has already learned.

Techniques

Professor Arguelles does not maintain that there is any special key to language learning other than systematic and disciplined hard work over long periods of time. Among techniques he has advocated are "shadowing" - simultaneously listening to and speaking along with recordings while walking rather than sitting, and "scriptorium" - reading aloud while transcribing texts by hand. In reviewing and evaluating textbooks he tends to favor older and more traditional materials over contemporary publications. In terms of time management skills he recommends simultaneous rather than sequential language study.

Publications

• North Korean Reader (206 pages, Dunwoody Press 2010) ISBN 978-1-931546-76-8
• Korean Newspaper Reader (293 pages, Dunwoody Press, 2007) ISBN 978-1-931546-37-9
• English French Spanish German Dictionary (735 pages, Librairie du Liban, 2006) ISBN 9953-86-056-4
• A Handbook of Korean Verbal Conjugation (Co-author: Jongrok Kim, 311 pages, Dunwoody Press, 2004) ISBN 1-931546-03-7
• A Historical Literary and Cultural Approach to the Korean Language (Co-author: Jongrok Kim, 318 pages, Hollym, 2000) ISBN 1-56591-151-2
• 프랑스어 동사변화안내 La Conjugaison des Verbes (345 pages, 신아사, 1999) ISBN 89-3896-066-3
• Viking Dreams: Mythological and Religious Dream Symbolism in the Old Norse Sagas (460 pages, University of Chicago Doctoral Dissertation, 1994. UMI Dissertation Services Order Number: 9425353 www.umi.com)