Polyglot: How I Learn Languages by Kató Lomb, translated by Ádám Szegi and Kornelia DeKorne

    What a fantastic book! Instructional books can be so boring but Polyglot is this amazing memoir/instructional combination that is informative and entertaining. She is so interesting since she only started her language learning journey when she was in her thirties, after training to be a chemist. Lomb gives the reader the story of her life through lessons in adult language learning. This book is not for a new language learner so much as it is for ALLs, or Adult Language Learners, who are striving to learn multiple languages. So more for someone learning their third, fourth, or fifth, not their second language. I picked it up because I saw passages from the book on the internet and was interested in some functional tips, and I couldn't put it down because Lomb's voice just makes the book really readable and fun. She writes relateably and she writes beautifully, from "Could it be possible to build with such diamond bricks the thought bridge that spans the space between minds?" to funny stories about inviting a French tourist to the Budapest tourism office where she worked...but accidentally describing it as a brothel (or when she brags about going to the movies 17 times on a three-week trip to Moscow, becoming such a regular that they held a movie five minutes for her because she was running late). She also calls the central Hungarian plain a "mirage-haunted flatland," which I've never heard before.

    Lomb is insistent that she does not have any special aptitude for language learning (despite being fluent in 16 languages) and that anyone can do what she can do. She even writes out a formula:

Invested Time × Motivation/Inhibition⁠ = Result

But I am skeptical that anyone can do it. She describes pure elation at perusing dictionaries, and staying up late to tune her radio to foreign airwaves and taping broadcasts she likes. Basically, she may not have had an aptitude, but her motivation was beyond what almost anyone would do. She is unique, though. She discusses signing up for advanced Polish classes without knowing a word of Polish: when the instructor is astonished that she is at a totally basic level, Lomb replies, "those who know nothing must advance vigorously." She is just an indefatigable character.

    The beauty of foreign language study, she writes, is that it is one of very few things worth doing poorly. Dabbling in medicine, science, or law won't get you into an OR, a laboratory, or a courtroom. But having just a little bit of a foreign language provides huge marginal benefits over lacking any familiarity. Knowing enough to get directions somewhere is a massive improvement over being lost abroad.

    Lomb advises starting a new language by just picking up a dictionary and exploring it. As an ALL advances in learning, she advises them to use the dictionary, but not to abuse it by immediately jumping to it. Instead, ALLs should try to use context clues, and if they must use the dictionary, should write down not just the meaning of an individual word, but the meaning of the context in which it was used. After that initial dictionary perusal, she recommends picking up a textbook and starting to teach oneself (she definitely didn't have access to the internet for language learning in 1970). She then recommends picking up books and just starting to read. If she doesn't know a word, she tries to just learn from context and keep going unless she becomes completely lost without the word, and then she opens up a dictionary. The point of reading is to enjoy the language, not to stop to look up each word, which ruins the experience. To practice listening, she listens to news bulletins in foreign languages.

    Lomb gives the reader some rules she calls the Ten Requests. Paraphrased here, they are:

1. Spend a little time working on the language each day, especially in the morning 
2. When your enthusiasm is low, don't stop studying, switch to another form (e.g. listening instead of reading).
3. Never learn isolated units of speech, learn in context.
4. Write phrases in the margins of your text and build prefabricated phrases to use as crutches in conversation.
5. Translate random billboards, ads, and numbers you see in daily life.
6. Don't memorize anything that hasn't been reviewed for accuracy.
7. Always memorize idiomatic expressions in the first person (e.g. I'm pulling your leg).
8. Foreign language is a castle that must be besieged from all directions: newspapers, radio, movies, technical or scientific papers, textbooks, and conversation.
9. Don't let fear of embarrassment stop you from making mistakes, and don't let pride get in the way of being corrected.
10. Have faith that you are a linguistic genius, and that it's the pesky language's fault, or the dictionary's fault, but that you are smart enough to do it.

Then she also gives a list of things one should not do when learning a foreign language:

1. Do not postpone learning.
2. Do not expect your fellow language-learners to be good partners for conversation.
3. Do not believe that taking a class is all you need to do. You need to work outside class.
4. Do not obsess over words you don't know, build comprehension on what you do know.
5. Do not forget to write down your thoughts in your own words by using familiar expressions.
6. Do not be deterred from speaking by fear of making simple mistakes.
7. Do not forget filler expressions like "My French is kind of shaky" to use in conversation.
8. Do not memorize anything outside its context.
9. Do not leave newly learned structures or expressions hanging in the air--use them and practice them as soon as possible.
10. Do not be shy of learning poems or songs by heart.

    Lots of her language advice is also life advice. She writes how she "heard from a swimming coach that how soon children learn to swim depends on how much they trust themselves and the surrounding world. I [Lomb] am convinced that this (self) confidence is the precondition of success in all intellectual activity." All in all, I loved this book and would recommend to anyone learning a third language.