Kató Lomb

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The native form of this personal name is Lomb Kató. This article uses the Western name order.

Kató Lomb (Pécs, February 8, 1909 - Budapest, June 9, 2003) was a Hungarian interpreter, translator, language genius and one of the first simultaneous interpreters of 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 (in four of them even without preparation), 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 (Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Ukrainian). 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 (in print and on the air) and conversations, she tried to share this joy with generations. As an interpreter, she visited all five continents, saw forty countries, and reported about her experiences and adventures in a separate book (Egy tolmács a világ körül, "An interpreter around the world").

Contents

[edit] Her language learning method and principles

Her keyword was most of all interest: the word, coming from Latin interesse (originally meaning "to be between"), 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 with a fraction, with motivation in the numerator (through which we can pinch off some ten minutes a day even with the busiest job), and inhibition in the denominator (the fear of starting to speak, of being clumsy, of being laughed at). 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. (Out of the elements of these words, coming from Greek, auto- means self, and -lexia, -graphia and -logia refers to reading, writing and speaking respectively.) 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 (a detective story, a love story, or even a technical description would do), 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. ("It's much more of a problem if the book becomes flavourless in our hands due to the many interruptions than not learning if the inspector watches the murderer from behind a blackthorn or a hawthorn.") So we don't really need even a 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. (This method was, incidentally, applied successfully even before her, by a Hungarian writer, Dezső Kosztolányi as well: according to his account, he studied Portuguese practically exactly the same way during a holiday of his.)

Another keyword of hers was context (she was playfully called Kati Kontext herself): on the one hand, in understanding a text (be it a book or a heard 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 (which is perhaps the best possible way of learning), or she memorized them embedded in phrases (eg. high wind, keen wind), 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 (generally in the first person singular), 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."

[edit] Quotes

Lomb Kato was born and raised in Budapest and did not get interested in other languages until she was a young adult. A professional interpreter, she acquired high levels of proficiency in 17 languages, without extended stays in the country where the languages were spoken. I interviewed Dr. Lomb (her PhD was in Chemistry) 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 it 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."
References:
Krashen, S. and Kiss, N. 1996. Notes on a polyglot. System 24: 207-210.
Krashen, S. 2003. Explorations in Language Acquisition and Use: The Taipei Lectures. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Publishing Company.
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!" (I was 54 at the time.) What an inspiration! Since then I have plunged back into second language acquisition.

[edit] Works

[edit] In the original language, Hungarian

  • Így tanulok nyelveket (Egy tizenhat nyelvű tolmács feljegyzései) -- "This is how I learn languages (Notes of a sixteen-language interpreter)", 1970, 1972, 1990, 1995 (ISBN 963-602-617-3)
  • Egy tolmács a világ körül -- "An interpreter around the world", 1979 (ISBN 963-280-779-0)
  • Nyelvekről jut eszembe... -- "Languages remind me...", 1983 (ISBN 963-500-230-0)
  • Bábeli harmónia (Interjúk Európa híres soknyelvű embereivel) -- "Harmony of Babel (interviews with famous multilingual people in Europe)", 1988 (ISBN 963-282-023-1)

[edit] Known translations

(Translations in other languages also might exist)

[edit] External links

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