She stated that she worked professionally with 16 languages (Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish and Ukrainian), which she learnt from self-study due to her interest in them.

10–14); Latin (before and/or partly during her university studies); English (from 1933, on her own; this was when she developed her subsequent method of learning languages); Russian (from 1941, on her own; enabled her to understand Ukrainian, as well as Bulgarian to some extent); Romanian (on her own); Chinese (approx.

from 1950, in two years, at a university course[7]); Polish (around 1955, at a course); Japanese (from 1956, on her own); Czech (1954, on her own; similar to Slovak); Italian (on her own, after some antecedents in the 1940s); Spanish (in the second half of the 1960s, on her own); German.

Autolexia means reading for myself: the book I discover by myself, which provides novelties again and again, which I can take with me anywhere, which won't get tired of being asked questions.

Even she was bored with the fabricated dialogues of coursebooks, so her favourite method was to obtain an original novel in a language completely unknown to her, whose topic she personally found interesting (a detective story, a love story, or even a technical description would do), and that was how she deciphered, unravelled the basics of the language: the essence of the grammar and the most important words.

("It's much more of a problem if the book becomes flavourless in our hands due to the many interruptions than not learning if the inspector watches the murderer from behind a blackthorn or a hawthorn.")

(This method was, incidentally, applied successfully even before her, by a Hungarian writer, Dezső Kosztolányi as well: according to his account, he studied Portuguese practically exactly the same way during a holiday of his.)

Kató Lomb recommended using patterns, templates, "shoemaker's lasts" or "cookie-cutters" elsewhere as well: these are simple, skeletonized sample sentences for a structure or an idiom, elements which can be inserted into the speech like prefabricated slabs (generally in the first person singular), by applying them we can more easily construct even fairly complicated structures.

She didn't let herself be put off from her set objective by mistakes, failures or the ceaseless demand of perfection, but she always clung to the joyful, enjoyable side of language studies—maybe that's where her success lay.

Her saying may be useful for those less confident of themselves: "Language is the only thing worth knowing even poorly" (in Hungarian: "A nyelv az egyetlen, amit rosszul is érdemes tudni").

Szilard Kato, the daughter of a prominent local physician, was born and raised in Pecs, where she went to the University to earn her degrees.

About six years ago I met a woman in Hungary named Lomb Kato, a professional translator who had acquired 17 languages.