Victory Manual

I was helping Eun Hye practice English the other day and an interesting question came up. “Who do you admire?” Eun Hye was quick with a response, although I don’t remember the name she gave.

Eun Hye’s hero was a polyglot who ended up spending her life teaching at a prestigious university in Korea. She was Jewish raised speaking only Hebrew, learned German later, then English, and continued on to there, even eventually mastering Korean. That’s some role-model!

I didn’t have a role-model off hand. Yet. Just yesterday, I was browsing through a chain of links when I came across a biography of a seemingly well-known professor who posts frequently on a language learning forum. After I read through it, I found my new role-model.

Prof. Alexander Arguelles (Excellent first name, I might point out) was born an American into an all English speaking household. He started learning French at the age of 10 or 11, but it didn’t click immediately. It took about 4 years before he finally started to catch on to language learning.

He went to Columbia University where he continued his path in languages. By the time he graduated (22 years old) he had a solid foundation in French, German, Spanish, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. (6 languages!) He further pursued the educational path and learned many more languages, but most of them were classic languages that are no longer in colloquial use.

His passion is philology. It helps him greatly in acquiring languages, so that when he wanted to learn Dutch, Swedish, and Italian, he found that he only needed a few weeks immersion to get to know them well!

He ended up wanting a real challenge (like Sanskrit isn’t a challenge?) and decided to take on an East Asian language. He ended up choosing Korean, because according to research it is more difficult than Chinese and Japanese. (It’s true, at least compared to Japanese) He’s fluent in Korean now, too, after having worked at a university in Seoul teaching foreign languages for 9 years. (He also married a Korean woman, apparently)

Now, at the age of 43, he lives in Lebanon where he continues his career and education.

Here are the languages that he knows well:

Germanic (living): German / Dutch / Swedish / Danish, Norwegian / Afrikaans / Icelandic / Frisian
Germanic (historical): Old Norse / Middle English, Middle High German / Old English, Old High German

Romance (living): French, Spanish / Italian, Portuguese / Catalan / Occitan, Romanian
Romance (historic): Latin, Old French

Slavic: Russian / Polish / Serbocroatian, Czech, Bulgarian

Esperanto

Arabic, Persian, Greek, Irish, Hindi-Urdu.

And finally, what he considers to be in a class all its own, KOREAN.