Kató Lomb's book

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Kató Lomb's book

Postby Serpent » Tue Sep 08, 2015 3:57 am

Who else has read Kató Lomb's book on language learning?

Here are my personal highlights of it. My own thoughts, examples, additions or conclusions are in italics. For TLDR, see her ten rules/suggestions. Some topics I didn't include much (or at all) are her own grading scale, advice for future translators and interpreters, travel/cultural experiences, thoughts about Esperanto and other auxiliary languages.

HTLAL is mentioned in a footnote btw.

-To look it at another way, surely there are many unfortunate people who have needed to undergo multiple stomach surgeries. Yet no one would hand a scalpel over to them and ask them to perform the same surgery they received on another person, simply because they themselves had undergone it so often.

-Language is the only thing worth knowing badly (or just a little). I wonder if I've seen the paragraph quoted elsewhere and incorrectly attributed it to Barry Farber. Oops, shame on me if so. (Speaking of that, this book is a great choice for the challenge of broadening your horizons and reading authors that aren't cishet white males)

-Interesting how she used "false friends" to mean generalizations, ie words you "create" based on the patterns you know, rather than an incorrect usage or comprehension of the words that do exist (like the well-known examples with embarazado and constipado in Spanish).

-Interference doesn't come only from your native language, but also your first foreign language, maybe especially English. In my experience it can also come from any strong language, particularly from the same family/group.

-False friends exist even with numbers, see billions, milliards etc.

-She was shocked when someone had a car accident and she was told "Esperamos su muerte".

-An Italian beau will not succeed if he flatters a German girl by saying that he finds her calda and morbida (warm and soft), because calda connotes kalt (cold) and morbida connotes morbidität (morbid). Maybe if she's a gothic girl...

-Even if extrapolation has a certain negative impact on the acquirability of a new language, it may be a valuable means for fixing knowledge in our minds, because unfixed knowledge will fly away.

-To fix the knowledge, contrasting is one of the best ways. (she mostly describes contrasting the features of two languages)

-Let's not be angry then with mistakes. Many a valuable thing were born out of them — among other things, the French, Italian, and Spanish languages. All three developed from the vulgar (common) use of Latin.

-It's touching to see Russians described as actual liberators and good people. (My great-grandfather participated in the liberation of Budapest) I loved reading about her experience with my native language. It's also heartbreaking to find out that she first started ignoring the unfamiliar and opaque words out of necessity, as she didn't dare to consult a Russian dictionary.

-Wanderlust!!! Just a few pages in I already wanted to improve my Romanian... and to visit Hungary as well.

-She didn't approve of trying to learn a language only passively.

-There's no easy language. Some are just easier to learn poorly.

-Unfortunately, acquired vocabulary is not like a pretty porcelain figure that once you obtain, you can keep enclosed in a display case for the rest of your life.

-I’ve heard that famous conductors will practice a piece inside out nearly every minute. Then they will put it aside and not touch it before the concert one or two weeks later. They notice that it helps the performance. In language learning, the amount of a language learned while abroad will often not show up until well after arriving home.

-Sign up for classes way above your level, if you take them at all. (At least she did that with Polish when she already spoke Russian. It's certainly true that a beginner class will be boring if you speak a related language when most people don't)

-Repetition is vital.

-We love comfort. Americans are particularly fond of it.

-A complacent brain shows smaller resistance to repetition that drizzles like lukewarm rain than to the requirement of conscious concentration. I suspect that this is what sticks the young in front of our TV screens today. So computer games are clearly better. (What MBTI sees as a Sensing preference is deemed as laziness, choosing the minimal intellectual and physical effort)

-I always buy books in pairs: this increases the chance that at least one will be comprehensible.

-There is as little likelihood of squeezing an adult into the intellectual framework of their childhood as there is into their first pair of pajamas.

-An average adult [presumably learning their first foreign language, or the first after English nowadays] needs to study at least 10-12 hours a week, in her opinion. The proposed solution is to connect language learning with work and/or leisure.

-Persistent attention and self-effort are the preconditions of all successful learning.

-Interesting literally means being inside, within.

-Technical/scientific texts are the richest and the most reliable sources of technical terms (ie, better than dictionaries).

-She advocated self-talk and called it autologue, as opposed to monologue and dialogue.

-Frenchmen are/were too proud to get used to the fact that their language, "once a means of communication between emperors and ambassadors, is now stumbling from the lips of lowbudget tourists".

-It is food for thought that at the Congress of Vienna assembled after the fall of Napoleon in 1815, it was in French that the representatives of the Holy Alliance discussed the methods of eclipsing the French language and culture.

-An uninteresting partner is uninteresting in a foreign language as well.

-Read from the beginning, and read actively. Although more efficient means of learning exist, more accessible and obliging ones do not.

-More energy invested means better efficiency.

-The relationship that develops between you and the knowledge you obtain [through extensive reading] will be much deeper than if you had consulted the dictionary automatically.

-Also, the informality of the threesome means you can learn in a relaxed way without the tenseness and artificiality of the typical foreign language class. Sorry, nowadays this makes me giggle. But yeah, if study in a group, she thinks three is the best size.

-It's a fundamental truth of human nature to seek the pleasant and avoid the unpleasant.

-With some willpower, you can develop the habit of discussing your experiences with yourself in a foreign language. Again, it is only a matter of self-discipline. (I do that too)

-OMG the AJATT concept of linguistic microclimate (vs macroclimate) is borrowed from this book. I didn't realize.

-At first, we should read with a blitheness practically bordering on superficiality; later on, with a conscientiousness close to distrust.

-There is a great advantage to learning a language through written translations rather than conversation. To speak a foreign language is a matter of practice, and mistakes will be made. Unfortunately, it is difficult for intellectually confident people to accept making mistakes. Therefore they may refrain from speaking. As László Németh says, "Those with real knowledge only want to say what they know." In written translations, this problem does not exist; you do not have to display your knowledge spontaneously and you usually have the time and resources to avoid making mistakes.

-I frequently see men reading the easiest pulp fiction, armed with heavy dictionaries. They will read one word in the book and then look it up in the dictionary. No wonder they soon get bored of reading and end up sighing with relief when it is time for the news so they can turn on the TV.

-Who hasn't felt a mild shiver when throwing oneself into the cool waters of a lake? Who hasn't desired to climb back to the sunlit sand? And who hasn't been happy after a minute or two, after getting used to the cold of the water, for resisting the temptation? An interesting foreign language text should help the "swimmer" over the initial aversion and discouragement of reading.

-Language is present in a piece of writing like the sea in a single drop.
however:
-Text is always a woven fabric. You can take a word or phrase out of it but... [it] will only represent the whole as much as a snippet of fabric will represent the bolt of cloth it originated from. The threads interweave and strengthen each other...

-Words always need context. But facial expressions, intonation, gestures also count, and mnemonics create an artificial context.

-I recommend untidy glossaries with all my heart to everyone. Neatly inscribed lines with uniform pearly letters are like desert landscapes. They mix together and make you sleepy; memory has nothing to cling to. We gain firm and steady footholds if we write with different instruments (pen, pencil, or colored pencils) in various styles (slanting, upright, small letters, capital letters, etc). Nowadays computers and digital technologies make it even easier, of course.

-The knowledge you obtain at the expense of some brainwork will be more yours than what you receive ready-made.

-Ideally, learning should stimulate both the intellectual and emotional sphere.

-Vocabulary from easiest to hardest: nouns that refer to objects (house, book), adjectives denoting perceptible properties (colour, size), abstract nouns, verbs expressing specific actions (run, give), verbs expressing a symbolic action (complete, ensure).

-Filler words (quite, instead, though) are difficult because there are no objective concepts attached to them, but they're important.

-Similar words should be "lined up and interrogated at the same time".

-The first thing you should learn is "excuse me". Yet textbooks never teach it from the very beginning. This mirrors my own experience in Germany back in 2005, when I'd had 1.5 years of relatively good German classes. I could say many things but I didn't know how to say excuse me.

-Textbooks suffer from "substantivitis", an excess of nouns. One had triple possessives in every sentence (the thoroughbred riding horse of the poacher of the neighbour's land).

-Language is a tool used for millions of purposes. Its change is natural: it stretches and it wears away, it widens and it shrinks. It loses its regular shape. And it loses its shape where it is touched by the most people: at everyday words. And everyday words are what all language learners must deal with.

-It is easier to understand a technical text than to correctly ask for a glass of water, or tell a good joke.

-A complicated structure? Undoubtedly. But after all, the cathedral of Milan is complicated too, and you still look at it with awe. (One of the best things I've heard about my native language)

-She admired youth slang.

-When doing simultaneous interpreting, she would close her eyes to concentrate. I admit I can't imagine deliberately not watching the person speak when the opportunity is there.

-"My daughter is around halfway at the moment. She knows 1500 words and with 1500 more she'll speak perfect German."

-Kids are not exceptional language learners, they just put in a lot of time.

-A school's way of assessing readiness is typically a poor measure of the personal knowledge the child has acquired in his or her natural environment. Same with assessing what an adult has learned from input.

-Grammar is very abstract. "I will sooner see a UFO than a dative case or a subject complement."

-As we age, details blur but the perspective becomes broader.

-Practise monologues. Challenge yourself to remember as many synonyms as you can.

-Use a dictionary, but don't abuse it. At first it inspires thinking, later (in your learning) it makes you stop. When you look up a word you knew but forgot, use the L2-L1 part or a monolingual dictionary.

-Don't reread your uncorrected texts/translations or especially learn them by heart.

-Dictionaries are (in her opinion/experience) the best way to learn a new alphabet.

-Apart from tragic cases like brain injury, we can't really be sure which language we think in.

-We have compared speech in a foreign language to so many things—let’s compare it now to photography. Let’s suppose we see a beautiful rose and we want to take a photo of it. Nobody will press the lens against the individual petals and shoot them, one after another. Instead, you withdraw to a certain distance. You should go no further than what is necessary to see the whole of the rose when you glance into the viewfinder. The language learner who wants to translate words one by one makes the same mistake as a bad photographer. The object to be photographed, to continue the metaphor, should be the complete foreign-language form — a full sentence or phrase — not a part. (Aww, how times have changed. Now an average phone can take a good macro pic of the individual petal, and you have space for tons of pics :D)

-Her own strategy was playing around with a dictionary, then getting a textbook with answer keys and some literature. She'd use adapted texts at first or "any literature published before 1950", as she had trouble "understanding the style of modern novels, even in Hungarian". ;D

-She would initially write out the words that she understood, in context (sentences). Only after two or three reads she resorted to dictionaries and even then didn't look up everything.

-She essentially used radio news in several languages as parallel texts.

-The next step would be to find a teacher and expat. She'd practise listening (slower speech at first) and speaking, and she'd get corrections for her writing (free essays at first, later translations).

-Guests are not language teachers.

-Occasionally cringe-worthy for me as a feminist. Also a very simplistic approach to things like introversion, depression.

-Learning about the L2 country's culture/geography/economics/politics is/was a common form of procrastination. Easier for teachers too.

-While travelling, success depends on the previous knowledge and the opportunities to "observe and record the natives' speech".

-It is a grave delusion that merely staying in a foreign country will allow you to absorb its language. I think people have been misled by the Latin proverb Saxa loquuntur, or "Stones talk". :D

-"A" and "F" students will benefit the least from trips.

-I interrupt myself here to give some practical advice to those preparing to go to America. On the train, in the hotel lounge, or at the breakfast table, those sitting next to you will ask you the same questions. First question: "Where are you from?" Second: "What do you do?" Third: "What do you drive?" When I was a novice traveler, I admitted that I usually took the bus. People were so astonished that I changed my answer. I now say, "I don't think you know the make — it's an Ikarus." "Is it a big car?" they would ask. "Is it bigger than a Chevrolet?" "Much bigger!" I would reply with a quick flip of the wrist. (Ikarus is a Hungarian bus manufacturer.)

-When building a house, everybody finds it natural that the work begins with a foundation. No one wonders why after many working hours there is nothing to be seen above ground.

-If learning was only about innate talent, those who supposedly have it would master any language with the same ease.

- The complaint "I have no talent for languages" usually means that someone can only memorize new words with difficulty, after several tries.

-I heard from a swimming coach that how soon children learn to swim depends on how much they trust themselves and the surrounding world.

-It is an interesting rule that conversation is not absolutely necessary for speech to develop. It is enough in childhood to hear the sounds that don’t exist in our mother tongue for the ear to get used to them and for the mouth to be able to reproduce them later.

-Of the linguists of the past, my favorite is Tom Coryat, the ancestor of all hippies... His official trade was vagrancy: he set off at the age of 16 and walked 2000 miles, acquiring 14 languages in the process. According to his pledge, he never rode a cart and never changed his shoes — an example worth bearing in mind for our comfort- loving youth and also for our shoe manufacturing.

-For Kató Lomb, a knowledge of Hungarian means massive bonus points. For me that applies to Finnish ;)

-An interpreter’s job is an eternal compromise between the ideal of "I would like it perfect" and the reality of "that is what my time allowed." This career is not for perfectionists.

-According to a French proverb, "good is the enemy of better". (Doesn't apply to interpreting, in her experience) In Russian we have the opposite proverb.

-The general public thinks of interpreters as being members of a uniform profession, in the same way that they believed peasants to be of a uniform class until the liberation of 1945.

-Aww, a footnote explaining what Leningrad is.

-A politician once casually mentioned that he had heard about the Hungarian movie "Merry-Go-Round" being screened in Japan. She ended up running around the room in an attempt to explain the concept. Turned out the Japanese just use the English word.

-An early machine translation program turned "out of sight, out of mind" into "invisible idiot".

-She was once corrected for saying "all corners of the world", because the Earth is round. (I love literal interpretations. Should remember not to be like this)

-A student was asked to interpret for an ornithologist. "This is a hoopoe with perching legs and a double-feathered crest that can be made erected or decumbent." Utter silence followed. Then the interpreter started to speak: "Vogel!" (bird)

-"When he is dissected after his death," a disrespectful interpreter said of a foreign dignitary, "a million predicates will be found in his stomach: those he swallowed in the past decades without saying them."

Let's finish with a beautiful excerpt by a Hungarian writer:

That summer, my only thought was having a rest, playing ball, and swimming. Therefore, I didn't bring along anything to work with. At the last minute, I threw a Portuguese book into my baggage.

...in the open, by necessity, I resigned myself to the book, and in the prison of my solitude, formed by dolomite rocks on one side and vast forests on the other, between the sky and the water, I started to make the text out. At first, it was difficult. Then I got the hang of it. I resolved I would still get to the bottom of it, without a master or a dictionary. To spur my instinct and creativity, I imagined I would be hit by some great trouble were I not to understand it exactly, or maybe an unknown tyrant would even condemn me to death.

It was a strange game. The first week, I sweated blood. The second, I intuited what it was about. The third week, I greeted the birds in Portuguese, who then chatted with me...

...I very much doubt if I could ever use it in my life or if I would be able to read any other Portuguese books. But it is not important. I did not regret this summer's steeplechase. I wonder about those who learn a language for practical reasons rather than for itself. It is boring to know. The only thing of interest is learning.

...An exciting game, a coquettish hide-and-seek, a magnificent flirt with the spirit of humanity. Never do we read so fluently and with such keen eyes as in a hardly known, new language. We grow young by it, we become children, babbling babies and we seem to start a new life. This is the elixir of my life.

...Sometimes I think of it with a certain joy that I can even learn Chinese at my ancient age and that I can recall the bygone pleasure of childhood when I first uttered in the superstitious, old language "mother," and I fall asleep with this word: "milk."
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Re: Kató Lomb's book

Postby Brun Ugle » Tue Sep 08, 2015 5:54 am

It is boring to know. The only thing of interest is learning.


That is how I feel too.
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Re: Kató Lomb's book

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Tue Sep 08, 2015 5:38 pm

And Kató Lomb's 10 Don'ts for Successful Langugage Learning is here.
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Re: Kató Lomb's book

Postby Hanuman » Tue Sep 08, 2015 11:17 pm

Great post.

I read her book a couple months ago and really enjoyed it (I think I actually saw Khatz reference it on AJATT (maybe on the reading a book hundreds of times article???) so decided to check it out). A lot of things resonated with me also, really inspired me to read more extensively and more often.

Good to see her getting some love around here.
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Re: Kató Lomb's book

Postby Expugnator » Wed Sep 09, 2015 12:55 am

I usually avoid linguistic self-help books because they tend to be in English, so no language practice (for the same reason I try to direct my non-fiction towards French or German). This book seems interesting but I will probably keep postponing its reading - seriously, I even have a shelf named "Auto-ajuda linguística" on the iPad, but I've only read Benny's and Shekhtman's books so far.

And I also skipped Serpent's posts hallway because there were enough spoilers already :lol:

That said, such books do help and Kató Lomb's one seems to be helpful and not too self-centered.
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Re: Kató Lomb's book

Postby Serpent » Wed Sep 09, 2015 3:50 am

Same here, I registered for the SC with English specifically to allow myself to read more in it. There's also a Russian translation, though.
You can also try "Language is music" (available in many languages, I read it in Portuguese) and Gunnemark's book in Russian or Swedish.
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Re: Kató Lomb's book

Postby Iversen » Wed Sep 09, 2015 6:54 pm

While digging for some information in my log at HTLAL I found a reference to an analysis of Lomb Kató's book, written by Ron Peek from the University of London. And Krashen's article about her (from 1996) can be found here.
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Re: Kató Lomb's book

Postby Expugnator » Wed Sep 09, 2015 7:10 pm

Serpent wrote: There's also a Russian translation


Thanks, I found it! Will make it my casual Russian reading for weekends and hidden moments.
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Re: Kató Lomb's book

Postby Iversen » Wed Sep 09, 2015 9:04 pm

I just found the Russian version on my computer, and now I'm finally able to read it. Bye for now - I'll be busy the next couple of hours.
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Re: Kató Lomb's book

Postby diplomaticus » Fri Feb 12, 2016 7:29 pm

The links are not working for me.
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