Kató Lomb learned sixteen languages from novels

In Budapest in 1943 and 1944, Kató Lomb bought some second-hand Russian novels and taught herself Russian from them. She read them in an air-raid shelter during the siege of the city.

When it ended, her Russian got her work with the Soviet military command, and later with the Hungarian government. She had started with books she could not read.

That was her method for all of them. Lomb trained as a chemist and did not begin languages until her twenties.

She went on to interpret in sixteen, one of the first simultaneous interpreters anywhere, and she was careful to say which she used professionally (five), which she translated from, and which she had only read. Her book about how she did it, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, is free in English.

The method is almost embarrassingly simple. Start with a novel you want to read, before you can read it. Do not look up every unknown word. Guess from the sentence, skip what you can live without, and read with a pencil, marking the words that keep coming back.

A word that returns has earned a trip to the dictionary. A word that appears once has not. Recurrence does the sorting, and the story keeps you turning pages while it does.

She applied the same tolerance to speaking. Mistakes were the price of using a language, and she paid it. Her line, the one everybody quotes, was "Language is the only thing worth knowing even poorly."

Lomb was exceptional, and her account is her own. I am not going to claim that reading novels alone will make you an interpreter. But the thing she did is a thing anyone can do: pick a book you want, tolerate not understanding it, and let the words that matter announce themselves by coming back.

Aloglot is that method with the friction taken out. It reads the book to you so you keep moving, puts the English under each sentence for when guessing fails, and explains any word on a tap, so the pencil is built in.

Sources

• Lomb (1970; English translation 2008). Polyglot: How I Learn Languages. TESL-EJ.
• Wikipedia. Kató Lomb.