How did Kato Lomb learned Chinese? (I may need a Russia speakers help!)

[flameproof]

I recently stumbled while browsing Steve Kaufmann's blog over a reply mentioning "Kato Lomb".

http://thelinguist.blogs.com/how_to_learn_english_and/2007/03/listening_power.html#comments

(I am always fascinated by highly efficient language learners)

There is a link to Wiki too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kat%C3%B3_Lomb

And in the Wiki is a short link to her learning method in English:

http://www.english-learning.co.uk/lomb.alkire.html

In brief, she was a translator/interpreter that spoke 16 languages, incl. Japanese and Chinese.

Her method in simple terms:

1. Buy a book or two you are interested in the the target language.

2. Buy a dictionary in the target and a known language

3. Start reading

Simple and very straight forward. OK so far... But how about Chinese? To start that way must be quite frustrating. For a beginner, finding the word in the dictionary is already quite a task.

The English UK link has no mentioning about it. Her book is NOT translated in English. However, there is a Russian translation (in zipped DOC format, 106 pages):

http://linguists.narod.ru/books/KatoLomb.zip

I wonder if there are any clues how she started Chinese or Japanese. Can a Russian speaker maybe help?

[laowai1980]

There's just brief info, she says she enrolled in a chinese language course when it was available at a local university, and of course studied on her own. After 2 years she could translate for chinese delegations in her country and also translated chinese novels into hungarian. "It takes 3x longer to learn chinese or japanese, because for a chinese character you need to find out first how it sounds, only then its meaning." She also seems to have taught at the chinese language courses afterwards. Not much specific info there about how to learn chinese there. Looks like this principle "get a book, get a dictionary, start reading" can be applied to any language according to her, no particular diffirences, except for in chinese you have to look up character meanings in a different way.

[flameproof]

Спасибо! Very interesting indeed!

Here another guy that speaks 10+ languages. I will check the youtube tonight.....

http://stujay.blogspot.com

[trien27]

Once, someone told me there was a guy who could speak 7 languages. I'll bet maybe 6 of them could be related. 6 because the other one was English. or maybe half are related and the other half are also related. I can say I speak many languages. Half of what I know maybe in the same language family: Romance languages: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Romanian, Portuguese, French. Scandinavian languages: Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, & Finnish(put in the same category as others because of it's proximity to those other languages: Finnish or Suomi is actually closer to Hungarian.) The rest of the group could be called Germanic languages because they are very close to German. So, if I speak German and know some French words, I could learn Norwegian very quickly. Sino-Tibetan: Sino- is a Latin prefix meaning Chinese. Chinese is in no way related to Tibetan, they just grouped it that way. Note: Norwegian is more closely related to Swedish and Danish than it is related to German.

Going back to the topic: 7 languages: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Spanish Norwegian, French. I can say I'm fluent in all those languages. Japanese and Korean borrowed from Chinese characters, so some pronunciations are from Cantonese or Mandarin. Some Norwegian words are borrowed from the French. Spanish and French are derived from Latin. But learning Latin won't make learning Norwegian any easier.

I believe Kato Lomb studied related languages phonetically without learning the original written Chinese or Japanese, otherwise it's very hard to learn so many languages in such short time, especially Chinese or Japanese.

[flameproof]

trien27

Better read her Wiki. She spoke beside Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Ukrainian.

I believe she learned languages not for fun, but to make money with it as a translator. I also believe that she didn't learn just to have them on record. If so then Finnish and Estonian would have been very close to her.

For the "short time", she died when she was 95, so how much more time you need?

[Shadowdh]

so how much more time you need?

Sigh... an eternity... or at least so it seems...

[leosmith]

Her method in simple terms:

1. Buy a book or two you are interested in the the target language.

2. Buy a dictionary in the target and a known language

3. Start reading

To expand a little:

Kato Lomb's strategies

Discussion forum about her methods.

[Shadowdh]

thanks for the link... it will be interesting to read...

[zkazsi]

Vow, this is quite a surprise... I'd never have thought that Kato Lomb is so famous...

I'm Hungarian, have read several of her books, have always had great respect for her... nevertheless I'm quite shocked to see this question asked.

Zsolt