With Languages in Mind: Musings of a Polyglot by Kató Lomb

Meandering, repetitive grab bag on languages and language learning

Kató Lomb was one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished polyglots (a speaker of many languages). Learning languages was her great love, and she did it well enough to work as a professional interpreter in sixteen tongues. Lomb also wrote books on language learning and interpreting, three of which are available for free download as pdfs on the website of The Electronic Journal for English as a Second Language (TESL-EJ). One of those books, With Languages in Mind: Musings of a Polyglot, was originally published in Lomb’s native language of Hungarian in 1983. The contents are aptly described by the subtitle as “Musings.” The book is comprised of 35 chapters, each from one to a dozen pages in length, in which Lomb shares thoughts, anecdotes, and her expert wisdom on languages, their interesting peculiarities, and how to learn and teach them.

This book will appeal to both language educators and language enthusiasts. For members of the latter category (like myself), Lomb does not provide a “fluent in 30 days” wonder scheme for how to learn languages quickly, but she does describe her preferred methods and acquired habits for studying and practicing new languages. She also advises teachers on how her methods could be incorporated into language education to improve student enthusiasm and success. Interspersed throughout the book are humorous anecdotes and horror stories of Lomb’s work as a simultaneous interpreter at various academic and political conferences. There isn’t really much rhyme or reason to the organization of the book; it is just a haphazard pouring forth of linguistic minutiae as the expert pontificates on her love of languages in a lively and for the most part accessible manner. Some topics Lomb discusses include the importance of context in learning vocabulary, the growing tendency in many languages towards the use of more and smaller words, general differences in speech patterns between males and females, and the purported value of learning Latin. To illustrate the points made in each chapter, she often cites examples from the linguistic characteristics of English, German, Hungarian, French, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese.

Lomb wrote her books in Hungarian primarily for a Hungarian audience. Thus the text includes many references, puns, inside jokes, and historical anecdotes that can only be truly understood by a native Hungarian. The English translator Ádám Szegi and/or the editor Scott Alkire explain these Hungarian-specific comments with footnotes, but much of the humor and import of such comments is lost to the English reader. This is an issue common to all of Lomb’s writings, but With Languages in Mind is by far the most Hungarian-centric of the three Lomb books I’ve read (the other two being Polyglot: How I Learn Languages and Harmony of Babel: Profiles of Famous Polyglots of Europe). In regard to her native tongue, some topics Lomb covers include the qualities of Hungarian that make it a beautiful literary language, the effect of the World War II fascist regime on the language, and generational changes in Hungarian over time.

The editor points out that some of the content in With Languages in Mind has either been pulled verbatim or slightly altered from the earlier published Polyglot: How I Learn Languages. Having read Polyglot previously, much of the content of With Languages in Mind did feel like a rehash, though I still enjoyed Lomb’s enlightening linguistic musings the second time around. Of the three Lomb books mentioned above that are freely available in English, With Languages in Mind is the least essential read. The other two books, Polyglot and Harmony of Babel, are more interesting, better organized, and cover more compelling ground.
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