Hello, this is Michael Campbell with Glossika.
and I'm really honored to be here today with Alexander Argüelles
and Alexander is known throughout the world
for being one of the most prominent polyglots
who has studied and speaks fluently dozens of languages
maybe even 100 by now, I'm not sure
but it's a very large number of languages, and
all of these accomplishments, having been said
he's now working on a new vision, and
to really help people with their language learning throughout the world and
we'd like to hear more about all the projects he's working on and
all of the new developments in your life recently, so thank you-
Alexander: Okay
Mike: -for this opportunity to meet you.
Alexander: Thanks for having me. Thank you for having me.
Just to clarify something, I mean, I have- I do love languages.
I'm passionate about and I've been doing it
professionally systematically in a very disciplined fashion most of my life,
I have probably studied about 100 languages
but studied and know, be able to use it- I think you know, they're very different things, so
I have some form of knowledge of a hundred languages
but you've got a very vast database in you head as well.
So it's been a real pleasure talking to you about
ergative languages and things like that, so-
Mike: We'd like to throw out the little bits of exaggerations there anyway.
Alexander: Okay. Very good. Very good.
You want to know,-
Mike: but in reality where we all we all struggled to actually bring that fluency to life.
Alexander: Mhmm, yes
Mike: There's limitations to the to the human capacity
Alexander: Right, there certainly is
Mike: Certainly, at least there is for me, I can't compare with you.
Alexander: There's only so many hours in a day.
Mike: Yeah, that's true.
Alexander: That's an experience that I ran into a brick wall of that about 20 years ago
after I'd spent so much time being passionate about
learning as many languages as I possibly could
and I realized after a certain point, Hey, wait a minute
if you study systematically in a disciplined fashion every day for 15 minutes a day
you can go from knowing nothing to having a solid foundation in a year.
But if you want to go up to the next level
the solid foundation to you know
a real basic functional working knowledge that needs half an hour a day
and then if you want to go to a higher level that needs an hour a day
and even a higher level this many hours a day
Mike: this is perhaps the key to language learning right here,
15 minutes a day-
Alexander: Each and every single day-
Mike: Each and every day for how long?
Alexander: Well it depends on the language you know,
if you know if the language is similar to yours if
Mike: But if it's Korean to English, then-
Alexander: That would take a couple of years, maybe-
Mike: a couple years at 15 minutes a day.
Mike: But if you increase that to half an hour a day-
Alexander: definitely you could get solid foundation I think within a year, year and a half
Mike: and then if you're doing an hour a day and more intensively
It really changes the the time window to acquiring the language. Fascinating.
And so what you did originally was
kind of structure your day so you're doing
in different time slots, you'd be working on different languages.
Alexander: So exactly. Okay.
I mean, I got started studying, basically compared to historical linguistics and university.
I got my doctorate in area like that.
And so I you know, just went through a whole cycle of all the old the older Germanic languages
and just got a deep philological understanding of
how Latin changed into the Modern Romance languages.
And so from there, I branched out into Korean just because I wanted the challenge
of learning really, totally different language and the culture, and then while I was in Korea
also did your areas Japanese Chinese, classical Chinese all the for a while,
and that's when I got my-
started building my language laboratory
and just had material for studying you know, hundreds of languages and
just wanted to learn for various reasons
I wanted to learn some languages because they were in a family that I knew everything else already
and I want to know them all.
I want to learn other languages because they were different.
I wanted to see what they were like.
So yeah, I spent about five or six years just obsessively, fanatically studying languages
all day, every day
you know, in those 10, 15 minute time slots, you know,
and then working at them
and then at the end of that time period I realized
yeah, getting that foundation is one thing
but taking some of them that are really meaningful to me
like Arabic to the much higher level that requires just an investment of time that, you know
given our lifespans, and you know, the way the day is structured, you know
night and day, there's just only so many hours in a day. So, that's the limit is, it's that.
Mike: As far as getting a general introductory knowledge of a language
I mean, you get to the point where you've accumulated so much experiences
across a vast number of languages and language families that
when you see something new, although it's different,
you can almost piece it together in your mind
because you kind of know how human communication works already.
Is that true?
Absolutely. I mean, I'm going to give my talk on language experience learning Finnish
in about two hours, and that's basically what I'm going to report is that
Finnish is totally different from any language I've studied and that you know,
it's an Uralic language I've never learned an Uralic language before
you know it's the vocabulary is basically unrelated to anything else.
But when I looked at the structure,
when I looked at the grammar,
it was just like simplified, streamlined Korean, you know,
with a sprinkling of inflections thrown in
there was nothing I hadn't seen before
I looked at this and it's like a Finnish has this reputation of being
pretty difficult but then I looked at it as like know based on my experiences,
there's no challenge there.
Mike: It's something that you've done before.
So actually, for a Korean speaker, Finnish probably makes a lot of sense
despite the vocabulary difference
I've been into that many times now, that Koreans
a lot of our missionaries might go to South America and be in Peru and encounter Quechua
or plan to staying in a place like Turkey and learn Turkish or yes,
learning something like you know, another agglutinative language,
and it's like "Hey, this is easy."
The structure there does seem to be lended.
There's a lot of transfer that you can get out of knowledge structure,
not just, you know, real vocabulary
or specific, specific endings,
but just the basic structure.
Mike: So in your whole career,
what do you envision as your Opus Magnum?
Are you still working on that?
What what are your passions and envisioning for the final stage.
Alexander: I am, you know, for many years I have talked about dreamed about,
you know, just sort of,
I reached my limit to what I can do in my time.
And I just, I like sharing my passion
I like sharing my knowledge
I do believe that something that can be transferred as well.
I mean, it took me a long time to develop, you know
some of the the knowledge, the know how,
the skills that I have
and I do think that that's something I can, you know
just as you can transfer your knowledge of one language
I think those are things that I could transfer to other people
so they don't have to reinvent the wheel and learn how to do that.
And so I do think that there might be a way, a place for, you know,
a sort of an academy not necessarily for polyglotry,
but for people who are really serious and passionate about learning languages.
This is happening all over the world, particularly in the states that, you know,
universities and schools are closing language departments,
and I think when that happens, maybe 60 or 70% of people are happy,
but the 20 or 30% are unhappy.
Where are they going to go?
What are they going to do?
These people need to be more self sufficient in their learning as well.
So I just I've always enjoyed sharing knowledge,
sharing know how with other people
hoping that this will facilitate their quest,
their you know, their learning,
so that they can do it more efficiently
not waste time and have a better experience
and just just get better at it.
So I sort of envisioned this sort of Academy or Institute or training place for a long time,
and now I find myself in a professional position where I think I'm actually going to be able to do it.
That is the Concordia Language Village in Minnesota
where I'm the director of the intensive immersion programs for Italian, German, Swedish, Danish,
Norwegian and Finnish,
and they have about 15 languages and they're open to others.
And, you know, this is many of the professorships I've held around the world
because in my multi-disciplinary degree, I've had to read history in it several times
comparative history of religions, comparative historical linguistics,
history, this history that-
Mike: Oh, comparative religions, too? Wow.
So universities will look at that and say oh history meaning a history professor.
So Dubai, I was teaching history. And that was interesting for me.
It was teaching Middle East history.
I was learning more about the Middle East, I was using my Arabic to do that.
But in many of my positions,
I have felt like I've been hired abroad as an American
or wow, an American. he's a smart guy! He's got a good background.
Yeah, that's, you know, but they're not really interested in me who I am,
But this position they are, they know exactly who I am.
They know what I want to do and what I stand for,
if people are interested in coming to a place where they can learn
efficiently learn how to learn
and you know, do these kind of things,
I'm in a position to set that up,
I've got that resource library, I think I have 100 and materials for learning 142 different languages,
I don't have many Taiwanese indigenous languages,
maybe you'll share some of those, I'll get a larger collection
But I've got this massive library and it really breaks my heart that you know,
and I say, anybody want to borrow it, you can, and nobody does.
So I would love to be in a place where people could come
take these things, use the material, learn how they're doing.
And in particular, the languages that are taught at Concordia.
Go to these villages, first and foremost,
have an experience similar to what I had in Finnish, which is a very positive active immersion experience
from the workload that was very productive.
And then I think everybody taking their experience.
Once you can do that with one language, you could recreate that.
You could learn how to do that more and more effectively with others.
So I guess I'm kind of picking up from
I have two sons one 16, ones working, I've been homeschooling them all through high school
and teaching them lots of languages.
I've always spoken French with them from German, Latin, Spanish, little bit of Russian, Korean.
And so yeah, sharing languages with my sons first and foremost, with other people who were,
you know, may be interested in that's that's where my vision is now
I've sort of,
I don't think brain can really get full
but you know, I've done what, you know what I need what I want for myself with languages
I don't have this burning desire to go master Tibetan or you know, to do other things,
but it's more to help other people at this point.
Mike: So I found that because most of the people that we interact with in the world, their
primary focus in life is not languages, they have careers in the sciences or in the or
in other professions. But I found that if people were to spend more time on working
with languages, it's sort of a logical thing that can actually help them in their other careers.
Do you have a position on this? Do you think that people spending a little
bit more time working with a variety of languages, rather than kind of as an exercise,
a brain exercise. Do you think that that would actually help them in their careers?
Alexander: Yes, but then again, I'm speaking as a language lover, but I do think that there's science
behind it that says that, well, not even necessarily science, Language, you know, as the vehicle of culture,
and you know, just learning different cultures have different perspectives,
different ways of doing things. And so when you really learn a different language, you learn a different
culture that expands your horizons. And that can be seen as purely practical, okay?
You could forget about languages and just go and be, you know, businessmen in China based on that
you can transfer those skills. So you can just take that but even within what you're doing,
you know, when you understand what makes other people tick, how they work. I think that's something-
Mike: Sure, it does expand people's um, their view of the world, and become more,
I guess as the Chinese say , 包容.
They become more acceptable of the differences in the world because
often times I find that living in another culture, I may have been taught to do something a certain way.
And in another culture, they do it another way, the final result is the same. So why,
why get upset if somebody wants to do something a different way, right?
I'd like to ask you a question.
Do you ever find that motivation is sometimes a problem with your students?
And how do you overcome that.
Motivation to learn to learn a language?
Oh absolutely, that's a critical thing.
Mike: And how do you address that?
God to be perfectly frank, I just you know, there are some students you look at them and
you would have just give it all the more honest and say,
if you're not motivated, you shouldn't be doing this.
I mean, there's lots of things to do in life other than you know, other than
learn languages and if you're not absolutely required to do that, And you're not motivated
to do it then go to something that you're motivated for, you know, okay. All right.
So but you know, I think that motivation becomes a problem when somebody when there's when
there's a dichotomy when somebody says,
I really want to learn this language,
but their behavior and actions, study habits whatnot betray that they've got
conflicting motivation they have other motivation that you know that
they're not clear about it, you know, okay,
so again, the ones who have you know, I don't think everybody should study like this, I
don't think everybody should do anything. I think, you know, there's a lot of things
that people should be doing so when somebody comes
and they have no motivation to learn languages, what are you doing this for?
Sometimes like, like, I hear friends saying, I want to lose weight, but they're never able
to take the weight off. Right?
That there are people who say, you know, who adamantly say you want to learn the language,
and then it's just the same sort of, I don't know. I do think that there can be maybe there
should more often be sort of a not that I want to say spiritual - it's a bit strong,
but you know, a discipline, a practice area, an attitude, a lifestyle of learning languages.
If you come to me and you say, Hey, I really want to learn this language, but you know,
I say just like the weight loss or the other people who sign up for things, but they're not doing it.
That's what I would say, okay. Look, you brush your teeth every day, right? You know, you do.
So there are things that you do every day.
So habit is the way we get things done.
So make it happen.
Mike: Well it was great talking to you today. And thank you for having-
-you know, sharing all of your insights on on language learning.
Alexander: Okay.
Mike: And I wish you all the success with that vision.
Alexander: Thank you. Okay.