Kató Lomb


Kató Lomb was a Hungarian interpreter, translator and one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world.
Originally she graduated in physics and chemistry, but her interest soon led her to languages. Native in Hungarian, she was able to interpret fluently in nine or ten languages, and she translated technical literature and read belles-lettres in six languages. She was able to understand journalism in further eleven languages. As she put it, altogether she earned money with sixteen languages. She learned these languages mostly by self-effort, as an autodidact. Her aims to acquire these languages were most of all practical, to satisfy her interest.
According to her own account, her long life was highlighted not primarily by the command of languages but the actual study of them. Through her books, published in Hungarian in several editions as well as in some other languages, interviews and conversations, she tried to share this joy with generations. As an interpreter, she visited five continents, saw forty countries, and reported about her experiences and adventures in a separate book.

Her command of specific languages

As it can be seen, Danish, Hebrew, Latin, Slovak, and Ukrainian are mentioned only in the Hetek interview, whereas Czech, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Swedish are only in the Harmony of Babel. The languages listed at all places:
In Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, she refers 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 languages she was able to interpret in 10.
According to her account, she acquired the languages above in this order: French ; Latin ; English ; Russian ; Romanian ; Chinese ; Polish ; Japanese ; Czech ; Italian ; Spanish ; German.

Her language learning method and principles


Her keyword was most of all interest: the word, coming from Latin interesse, has a double meaning, referring to the material profit or the mental attraction, together: motivation. 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 the so-called 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 is within us, and the more we can put aside inhibition, the sooner we can take possession of the 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 : 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

*

In the original language, Hungarian

In English

The Chinese editions were translated from the Russian version.
'