Kató Lomb


Kató Lomb was a Hungarian interpreter, translator and one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world.
Originally educated in chemistry and physics, her interest soon led her to languages. Native in Hungarian, she could interpret fluently in nine or ten languages, translated technical literature, and read belles-lettres in six languages. She understood journalism in a further 11 languages. She stated that she worked professionally with 16 languages, which she learnt from self-study due to her interest in them.
According to her own account, her life was highlighted not primarily by her use of languages, but by her study of them. This was described in her books, conversations and interviews. As an interpreter, she visited 40 countries on five continents, and documented her experiences in her book.

Languages

In her interview with the Hetek newspaper, Lomb listed the following 16 languages as those she worked in professionally:
In the foreword to the first edition of her book How I Learn Languages, she wrote:
In the fourth edition of How I Learn Languages, she wrote:
In her book Harmony of Babel, she wrote:
Lomb cited Danish, Hebrew, Latin, Slovak and Ukrainian only in the Hetek interview, and Czech, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese and Swedish only in the Harmony of Babel. Altogether, she classified her languages as follows:
…for a total of 22 languages.
In Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, she referred to more languages she also understood. Including these, she claimed to know at least 28 languages at least at a level enabling her to comprehend written texts, out of which she was able to interpret in ten.
According to her account, she acquired the languages above in this order: French ; Latin ; English ; Russian ; Romanian ; Chinese ; Polish ; Japanese ; Czech ; Italian ; Spanish ; German.

Learning method and principles

Lomb's guiding principle was interest: The word, coming from Latin interesse, has a double meaning, referring to the material profit or the mental attraction, together: motivation. She wrote, "This means that I can answer these questions: How much am I interested in it? What do I want with it? What does it mean for me? What good is it for me?" She didn't believe in natural "language talent". She tended to express the language skill and its fruitfulness with a fraction, with motivation in the numerator, and inhibition in the denominator. In her conviction, the stronger the motivation, and the more one could put aside inhibition, the sooner one could possess a language.
As she put it, she drove three autos in the world of languages, namely autolexia, autographia and autologia. Autolexia means reading for myself: the book I discover by myself, which provides novelties again and again, which I can take with me anywhere, which won't get tired of being asked questions. Autographia means writing for myself, when I try to write about my thoughts, experiences, everyday things in the very language I'm just learning, no matter if it's silly, no matter if it's incorrect, no matter if a word or two is left out. Autologia means speaking with myself, when I try to express my thoughts or what I see on the street in the language I'm studying, when I keep on chatting to myself.
Even she was bored with the fabricated dialogues of coursebooks, so her favourite method was to obtain an original novel in a language completely unknown to her, whose topic she personally found interesting, and that was how she deciphered, unravelled the basics of the language: the essence of the grammar and the most important words. She didn't let herself be set back by rare or complicated expressions: she skipped them, saying: what is important will sooner or later emerge again and will explain itself if necessary. So we don't really need to look up each and every word in the dictionary: it only spoils our mood from the joy of reading and discovering the texts. In any case, what we can remember is what we have figured out ourselves. For this purpose, she always bought her own copies of books, since while reading she wrote on the edge of the pages what she had understood from the text by herself. This way one cannot avoid picking up something of a language—as one can't rest until one has learnt who the murderer is, or whether the girl says yes in the end.
Another keyword of hers was context : on the one hand, in understanding a text the context is relevant, it can help us several times if we don't understand something; on the other hand, she never studied words separately, isolated, but they either remained in her mind based on the text she read or the context she encountered, or she memorized them embedded in phrases, so if one comes to forget one of them, the other word often used together with it will trigger the former. From adjectival phrases, we can even recall the gender in many cases. Kató Lomb recommended using patterns, templates, "shoemaker's lasts" or "cookie-cutters" elsewhere as well: these are simple, skeletonized sample sentences for a structure or an idiom, elements which can be inserted into the speech like prefabricated slabs, by applying them we can more easily construct even fairly complicated structures.
She didn't let herself be put off from her set objective by mistakes, failures or the ceaseless demand of perfection, but she always clung to the joyful, enjoyable side of language studies—maybe that's where her success lay. She besieged the fortress of language again and again in a thousand and one ways. Her saying may be useful for those less confident of themselves: "Language is the only thing worth knowing even poorly".

Quotes


Szilard Kato, the daughter of a prominent local physician, was born and raised in Pecs, where she went to the University to earn her degrees. She moved to Budapest after age 21, where she met and married Laub Frigyes, an engineer from a prominent family of electrical engineers. As a young adult, she became interested in other languages while in the family's bomb shelter as Russian troops were advancing on Budapest. She was quoted by her family as having said the following: "Kids, we are going to have to learn Russian now...". She managed to acquire a Russian typewriter and started learning the language. This single step started her on the road to a long and illustrious career in languages. As the Russian liberation unfolded, she served for a time as the translator for the Russian Commander of Budapest. In later years she became a professional interpreter. She acquired high levels of proficiency in 17 languages without extended stays in the countries where the languages were spoken. I interviewed Dr. Lomb in depth ten years ago in Budapest. She attributed her success to massive amounts of comprehensible input, mostly through recreational reading. She was personally very interested in grammar and linguistics but felt they played a small role in language acquisition, loved dictionaries but looked up words when she read only if the word re-appeared several times and she still did not understand it, and hated to be corrected: "Error correction makes you sick to your stomach."

– From:
About six years ago I met a woman in Hungary named Lomb Kato, a professional translator who had acquired 17 languages. At the time we met she was 86. Her last words to me changed my life: "Stephen, you are so young. So many years left, so many languages to acquire!" What an inspiration! Since then I have plunged back into second language acquisition.

– Stephen Krashen

Works

In Hungarian

Így tanulok nyelveket – "This is how I learn languages ", 1970, 1972, 1990, 1995 Egy tolmács a világ körül – "An interpreter around the world", 1979 Nyelvekről jut eszembe... – "Languages remind me...", 1983 Bábeli harmónia – "Harmony of Babel ", 1988

Known translations

In English

Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, 2008. The 2011 edition, with updates not available in the PDF versions, is available from Amazon and Lulu com.Harmony of Babel: Profiles of Famous Polyglots of Europe – 2nd Edition, 2018. The second edition has an Editor's Preface and the transcript of an interview Dr. Lomb gave to Hungarian TV in 1974, translated by Ádám Szegi. The book is available from Lulu com. With Languages in Mind: Musings of a Polyglot, 2016. The printed book is available from Amazon and Lulu com.

Other languages

, 1978, 1996
  • わたしの外国語学習法,, Par valodām man nāk prātā, 1990 Kaip aš mokausi kalbų, 1984
  • 《我是怎样学外语的》, 1982
  • 《我是如何学习外语的》, 1983 Kuidas ma keeli õpin – ehk Kuutteist keelt oskava tõlgi märkmed
  • 언어 공부 - 16개 국어를 구사하는 통역사의 외국어 공부법, 2017
The Chinese editions were translated from the Russian version.
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