Recently I had a conversation with someone and it reminded me of something from my past that I thought I’d share with you, concerning a topic I rarely discuss (music) and one that I often write about (language).

Long before I was “Sam cel Roman”, long before I even came to Romania, long before I worked for various governments, long before I was even a pimple faced employee at an American fast food restaurant, long before I even held my first job, before I knew how to drive a car, before I had ever kissed a girl, I had what I guess you could call a career, although it was over and done with by the time I was 12 years old.

When I was very young, I used to play the piano. I played the piano a lot. I played it in the morning before school and for hours after school. I had regular lessons, not just on the actual playing of the keys but also on the theory behind it. I also used to be driven around all over the place to play in performances and competitions. For a few years there, it was a major component of my life.

From all of that, I learned two very valuable skills. It’s a little strange to think of it this way but playing a piano is very similar to typing on a keyboard. You need to coordinate all 10 of your fingers in a specific way to get a specific result. The piano is stretched out laterally and has 88 keys while a modern computer keyboard is more compact and has around 126 keys but they’re really not that different.

The last time I was officially tested, it was determined that I could type at 112 words per minute, which translates to 672 keys pressed per minute (a “word” is 5 letters plus the spacebar) or over 10 keys per second. And that was my sustained speed for several minutes on an unfamiliar keyboard down in the office where they used to test such things.

I sincerely doubt that I still type quite that fast these days but over the years it has served me well. It helped me enormously any time I had an office job and used a computer. It helped me earn money on the side writing other people’s papers and essays for high school and university. And of course it helps me even today in writing all of the things I write.

The other skill I learned from my career as a young piano player relates to music theory, which is a deep and complex subject that I won’t elaborate on too much here. The long and short of it is that certain sounds “go together” (se potriveste) and sound harmonious to human ears and others don’t. And on a piano, the note that you hear from each key is determined by the length of a metal wire (or string) that it’s connected to. Therefore these notes have both theoretical and literal relationships that can be understood and expressed mathematically. One note plus a second note an octave higher sound harmonious and pleasing.

But writing these on paper or staring at various metal wires vibrate with your eyes is a little dull and music, when done right, is beautiful and inspirational and amazing. So one of the things we always used to do in music theory classes was the teacher would sit at the piano and play a melody. We couldn’t see the keys he/she was playing but had to write down (in musical notation format) what they were playing. In other words, we were being trained to take what we heard and visualize it and then write it down.

The application of this to language is, I hope, obvious. Language is much more than grammar and syntax and declinations and conjugation. There is also a rhythm to it, a speed, a flow. And sometimes this is very hard to “hear” and to “visualize” for someone who isn’t born and raised around it. I think just about everyone agrees that your first impression when being around speakers of a new language is that they’re all speaking “very fast”. It’s only when you’re fluent that it sounds more “slowed down” and “normal”.

Keeping all that in mind, check out the following video of the first movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. I’m quite sure you know this music very well.

Some of you will look at this and get bored. The visual data you’re seeing will “clog up” what you’re hearing and this will all seem like too much information and so it will just feel tiring and you’ll pause it and shut it off and say it’s boring.

Others however will use the various lines and hear a kind of “pop” in your head as suddenly you can hear much more than you ever could before. This is, after all, an orchestra which means that dozens of instruments are all playing at the same time. It can be quite difficult to hear them separately as your mind tends to focus mostly on the melody or “primary” sounds. But if you’re a very visual person, tracking these different parts with your eyes will sort of allow your ears to hear multiple tracks separately and simultaneously.

Besides just being a super cool video, this also goes a long way to explaining why some people think I speak Romanian extremely well and others think I speak it very poorly. Hopefully you all know the “37 Steps” and how I learned the language, but now you can see kind of what goes on inside my head as well.

For those of you who think I speak it well, it’s not really because my grammar is so good or because my declinations are all in order, it’s because I am “playing” (with my voice) the rhythm and the flow and the cadences of Romanian. It’s the way that certain sounds rise and fall, or how long you stretch out some words and softly, barely play other sounds. This is what makes it sound right even though on paper it may not be. Likewise, for those of you who don’t think I speak Romanian well (or any other language), it’s because the cadence, rhythm and flow sound “off” or not correct.

One of my favorite party tricks is to pretend to speak about 20 languages, including most definitely languages I do not speak, I cannot conjugate verbs in and I do not write whatsoever. Whether Chinese or Hungarian, what I am actually doing is mimicking the sound, the flow, the cadence, the rhythm of how these languages come across and “sound” to people’s ears. It’s akin to humming Beethoven’s Fifth as opposed to playing it with an actual musical instrument.

Which reminds me of one last story, which I’ll tell and then conclude this post. Years and years ago when I did meet my first Romanian, I obviously did not speak the language whatsoever. But we worked together for some very long hours and she did not speak English that well and so would speak to me in Romanian and somehow we began to understand each other. And one day our boss came in and heard us speaking, me just mostly making these rhythms and flows and cadences, and sincerely thought I had actually learned to speak Romanian. He was angry because he thought we were communicating in a language he did not understand :) and immediately ordered us to speak only in English.

AND NOW YOU KNOW!