Kato Lomb was born at an exciting time. It was 1909 in Budapest, and the world that she grew up in was going to see great changes.
After getting her degree in physics, she looked for the job everywhere, but failed. She saw little hope of getting a job in the scientific fields. So she decided to teach English. She just had to learn it first. In her language learning Kato started reading cheap but exciting novels, carrying a dictionary with her all the time.
Her way of language learning made sense --if the story is exciting enough, it can keep you going past what you don't understand. In the end, you can-pick up what you need from the context. The reading took her further than she could have imagined. After the end of the Second World War, she began a long and successful career of interpretation and translation. In fact she was one of the first professional simultaneous interpreters in the world. Simultaneous interpretation is a job much more difficult than translation as all the work happens in real time. Not stopping at English, she learned French, Russian, Polish, Chinese, Japanese and quite a few other languages that she used to work as a translator.
Kato believed that interest was the most important part of language leaning. Grammar could always come later if you were excited about learning and understanding new words in the language. No matter what language she was learning she always believed she could complete the task and could keep studying her whole life.
