Ben: Welcome back to Vocafy Unpacked. I'm Ben, and I'm here with Clara. Today we're going back almost a century to meet someone whose approach to language learning can sound surprisingly modern.
Clara: Hi Ben. And I should probably admit from the beginning that I have a soft spot for this one. Kató Lomb is one of the language learners I admire most.
Ben: That's a strong recommendation. Who was she?
Clara: She was Hungarian, born in 1909, and her original academic world wasn't languages at all. She studied physics and chemistry and earned a doctorate in chemistry.
She later became a translator and one of the early simultaneous interpreters. At the height of her career, she worked professionally with 16 languages.
Ben: Sixteen sounds almost unbelievable.
Clara: It does, but Lomb herself was careful about that number.
She openly said that she did not know all 16 languages at the same level.
There were languages such as Hungarian, Russian, English, French and German that she could use very freely. With some others she could translate or interpret after preparation. And there were languages she mainly worked with through written texts.
Ben: I already like that answer more than the usual polyglot story where somebody supposedly speaks thirty languages perfectly.
Clara: Exactly.
She wasn't interested in turning language learning into magic.
In fact, one of the recurring themes in her writing was almost the opposite. She wanted to remove some of the mystery surrounding the idea of being naturally gifted at languages.
Ben: Was she one of those people who had been learning languages brilliantly since childhood?
Clara: No, and that's one reason her story is so interesting.
She had learned some languages at school, but she didn't describe herself as a remarkable language student.
Her serious independent language-learning journey really began as an adult.
In 1933 she wanted to improve her employment prospects, so she began teaching herself English.
Ben: How?
Clara: With a novel.
And not a specially simplified learner book.
She began working intensively with a novel by John Galsworthy.
At first she understood very little. She later wrote that after a week she was beginning to sense her way through the text, after about a month she could understand it, and after two months she was enjoying it.
Ben: That sounds either inspiring or terrifying, depending on what page you're currently stuck on.
Clara: Probably both.
But this tells us something important about Lomb.
She was willing to tolerate partial understanding.
She didn't think you had to know every word before a text became useful.
Ben: That's quite different from how many of us learned languages at school.
You read a paragraph, stop at every unknown word, look it up, write it down, and by the time you reach the end you've forgotten what the paragraph was about.
Clara: Exactly.
Lomb used dictionaries. She wasn't against them at all.
But she didn't want the dictionary to control the reading.
When reading a new book, she often tried first to work out meaning from the context. She would record useful words together with sentences rather than as isolated items. Only on later readings would she look up more of what she still didn't understand.
Ben: So the story came first and complete vocabulary knowledge came later.
Clara: That's a fair way to describe it.
And the choice of what to read mattered enormously to her.
One of her simplest recommendations was to choose something that genuinely interests you.
A detective story, a technical text, a magazine, whatever pulls you forward.
Ben: That sounds almost obvious.
Clara: It does now.
But there's a practical insight underneath it.
A difficult foreign-language text creates friction. If you don't care what happens on the next page, it's very easy to stop.
Curiosity gives you a reason to keep going even when your understanding is incomplete.
Lomb wrote very directly about this. Interest, in her view, was one of the forces that helped learners through those moments when the language itself became frustrating.
Ben: And English wasn't the only language she learned that way.
Clara: Far from it.
Russian gives us another great example.
In 1941, Lomb decided to learn Russian.
She found an old two-volume Russian-English dictionary in a secondhand bookshop. It had been published in 1860 and was apparently in pretty terrible condition.
She bought it and started working.
Ben: Wasn't learning Russian in Hungary in 1941 politically rather awkward?
Clara: Very much so.
Hungary was moving deeper into the Axis camp, so openly studying Russian could attract unwanted attention.
Lomb had already developed a way of learning through texts, which became useful because formal opportunities were limited.
She tried classic Russian literature but initially found it too difficult. Then she found a much easier novel and worked through that instead.
Later, during the war, she continued reading Russian even under extremely difficult circumstances.
Ben: So this wasn't a carefully designed language course.
Clara: Not remotely.
And that's another theme in her life.
She used what she could find.
Books, dictionaries, radio, newspapers, conversations, technical documents.
She once described a foreign language as something like a castle that should be attacked from every direction.
Ben: That's very Lomb.
Clara: Very much so.
And it matters because her philosophy wasn't simply "read novels and ignore everything else."
She also listened to radio, used dictionaries, sought teachers and native speakers, studied patterns, translated texts and deliberately practised speaking.
Her approach was broad.
Ben: What about grammar?
The usual retelling of her story is that she basically ignored grammar and learned everything naturally from context.
Clara: That's too simple.
She disliked the idea that language learning should begin and end with memorising vocabulary lists and digesting grammar rules.
She preferred discovering patterns through the language itself and then using grammar to help make sense of what she was seeing.
So she wasn't saying that grammar is useless.
She was changing the order of importance.
Language first, analysis in support of it.
Ben: That feels like an important distinction.
Clara: It is.
We should also remember that Lomb was describing what worked for her over many years.
Her books aren't controlled scientific experiments.
Some of her ideas fit comfortably with things language teachers and researchers discuss today. Others are simply the observations of an exceptionally experienced learner.
What makes her fascinating is that she kept asking practical questions.
What keeps me interested?
What makes me afraid to speak?
How can I fit this language into my life?
What can I learn from context before reaching for an explanation?
Ben: Which brings us to her famous equation.
Clara: Yes.
Lomb eventually expressed her view of language-learning success with a deliberately simple formula.
Invested time plus motivation, divided by inhibition, gives the result.
Ben: That's a very chemist-like thing to do.
Clara: It is.
And she knew perfectly well that human learning couldn't literally be reduced to an equation.
The point was the relationship between those factors.
Spend more meaningful time with the language.
Have a stronger reason to learn it.
And reduce the inhibition that stops you from actually using it.
Ben: What exactly did she mean by inhibition?
Clara: One important part was fear of making mistakes.
You know the feeling.
You know roughly what you want to say, but you're not sure the sentence is correct, so you say nothing.
For Lomb, that hesitation could become a serious obstacle.
She believed that imperfect communication still had value.
Ben: That's where her famous line comes from.
Clara: Yes.
She liked to say that languages were the only thing worth knowing even poorly.
And the idea behind that line is more interesting than the quote itself.
If your Italian is imperfect but it helps you ask which train goes to Milan, the language has already done something useful.
A grammatically imperfect sentence can still connect two people.
Ben: Which doesn't mean mistakes don't matter.
Clara: Exactly.
Lomb wanted corrections. She valued teachers and speakers who could correct her.
The point wasn't to celebrate mistakes.
It was not to let the fear of them prevent communication.
That's a very different idea.
Ben: So confidence wasn't pretending you were correct.
Clara: Right.
It was being willing to try, discover that you were wrong, adjust, and continue.
Ben: You mentioned motivation in the equation too. Did she mean the kind of motivation where you make yourself study every night because you've bought an expensive course?
Clara: Not quite.
For Lomb, motivation was often very concrete.
She learned English partly because she needed work.
She began Japanese because she had taken on the rather ambitious task of translating a Japanese chemical patent at a time when finding a Japanese teacher or textbook in Hungary was extremely difficult.
Her curiosity mattered too.
She genuinely enjoyed solving the puzzle of a language.
Ben: So motivation wasn't necessarily some grand lifelong dream.
Clara: Exactly.
It could be professional necessity, curiosity, a book you wanted to understand, a person you wanted to speak with, or simply the pleasure of figuring something out.
And she tried to connect language learning with the rest of life rather than making it a completely separate duty.
Ben: Which leads into another piece of advice associated with her. Daily contact.
Clara: Yes.
One of Lomb's practical suggestions was to spend some time with the language every day.
If time was short, she suggested at least trying a ten-minute monologue.
That's quite different from claiming that ten minutes is some scientifically perfect dose.
Ben: So no magical timer.
Clara: No.
Her larger point was continuity.
Don't disappear from the language for long periods just because you can't fit in a serious study session.
Change the activity if necessary.
Read something.
Listen.
Think through a little monologue.
Look through a dictionary.
Keep the relationship with the language alive.
Ben: Did she really talk to herself?
Clara: She strongly recommended what she called monologues or inner monologues.
She thought learners should practise constructing thoughts in the language even when there was nobody around to talk to.
That's useful for a very practical reason.
Conversation doesn't give you unlimited time to build every sentence.
Practising on your own lets you notice what you can express and where you get stuck.
Ben: So rather than waiting for a real conversation to discover that I have absolutely no idea how to explain what I did yesterday.
Clara: Precisely.
You can discover that problem safely in your kitchen.
And then you can find the missing language.
Ben: There's something appealingly unglamorous about all this.
Read a book.
Use a dictionary when it helps.
Listen to the radio.
Talk to yourself.
Keep going.
Clara: That's one of the reasons I like Lomb so much.
Her achievements were extraordinary, but her advice usually wasn't.
She didn't give learners a secret technique that would make a language effortless.
She emphasized time, curiosity, persistence and willingness to work with incomplete knowledge.
Ben: And willingness to look slightly foolish sometimes.
Clara: Absolutely.
But there's one more thing I think we should be careful about.
It's tempting to turn Lomb's life into proof that anybody can learn sixteen languages if they just use the right method.
That's not really the lesson.
Ben: Because she was clearly an unusual person.
Clara: Very unusual.
She was extraordinarily persistent, intellectually curious and spent decades working professionally with languages.
Her life demonstrates what one remarkable adult learner achieved.
It doesn't tell us that everyone will reach the same destination.
What it does challenge is the idea that serious language learning belongs only to people who were obviously gifted at it from childhood.
Ben: Especially because she started building much of this as an adult.
Clara: Exactly.
And she continued learning for decades.
That may be the part of her story I find most encouraging.
She didn't treat language learning as a phase you complete.
It remained something she did throughout her life.
Ben: If Kató Lomb were sitting here with us, what do you think she'd tell a learner who's been studying for six months and feels hopelessly slow?
Clara: I obviously can't speak for her.
But based on her writing, I suspect she'd ask some very practical questions.
Are you spending enough time with the language?
Are you working with things that genuinely interest you?
Are you expecting yourself to understand everything too soon?
And are you so afraid of making mistakes that you're avoiding the very practice you need?
Ben: That's a rather uncomfortable checklist.
Clara: The useful ones often are.
Ben: So how would you summarize her approach without turning it into another internet recipe for fluency?
Clara: Stay curious.
Spend real time with the language.
Read things you actually want to understand.
Use context, but use dictionaries and explanations when you need them.
Return to the language regularly.
Practise producing it instead of waiting until you feel perfect.
And don't confuse imperfect language with useless language.
Ben: That's considerably better than "polyglot learns sixteen languages with one weird trick."
Clara: Much better.
And much closer to the woman herself.
Ben: Clara, I can see why you're a fan.
Clara: I warned you at the beginning.
Ben: Kató Lomb was a chemist, translator, interpreter and lifelong language learner. But perhaps her most useful legacy is much simpler.
Languages don't have to begin with talent or perfection.
They can begin with curiosity and the willingness to keep going.
Clara: I think she would have liked that.
Ben: Clara, thank you.
Clara: My pleasure.