Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Vlad Dracula was multilingual.
Known to historians as Vlad III,
he is also known in Romanian as "Vlad Țepeș"
or "The Impaler" in English.
The historical figure upon whom Dracula is based
is who we are talking about,
not the vampire character created by Abraham Stoker.
Born in Transylvania,
Vlad III moved south with his family to Walachia,
where his father, Vlad II, was king.
Vlad III was taught at home by tutors from Constantinople.
He studied the classics, math, geography, the usual things
and several languages:
Old Church Slavonic, Latin, German.
As a teenager, he learned Turkish while in captivity in the Ottoman Empire.
There's his signature in Latin.
Was Vlad the Impaler a monster?
Or was he a multilingual Machiavellian prince?
Both.
But what matters is this:
He made the most of his limited resources and left behind quite a legacy.
In my personal experience,
I have also found that being multilingual opens doors and takes you places.
And, no, gratuitous violence is not necessary.
Just like Vlad the Impaler,
I was also born in Transylvania and moved south with my family.
I was born in Copșa Mică,
which is 44 minutes away from Sighișoara, where Vlad Țepeș was born.
And then I grow up here in Slatina,
two hours away from Târgoviște, where Vlad held court 500 years before.
My mother tongue is Romanian, just like his.
It is a Romance language,
distant cousin to French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
And then I learned French, English and Latin in school.
I also taught myself some Italian, Spanish and German
through music, movies and books.
We did not get easy access to such resources
because for the first 15 years of my life,
Romania was under communism;
our borders were closed.
And yet it was compulsory for Romanian children
to study two foreign languages in school.
We started French in 5th grade and English in 6th grade.
By the time my class graduated from high school,
we had had eight years of French and seven years of English.
Romanian children also studied Latin in the 8th grade.
We learned to sing Gaudeamus.
I studied Latin again at the university,
and ten years later, when I was watching the West Wing
and Rob Lowe's character met up with his law school friends,
I joined them as they sang:
♪ Gaudeamus igitur Iuvenes dum sumus ♪
And recently, on Downton Abbey,
when Lady Edith said, "Sic transit gloria mundi,"
I knew she meant, "Thus passes away the glory of the world."
We studied such expressions, memorized them
and considered them an integral part of an educated person's vocabulary.
After high school,
I majored in French and English at the University of Bucharest.
As French majors, we took a course in Old French,
and there we could clearly see how words evolved
from Latin to Old French to Modern French.
And then we took another course in comparative linguistics,
and we learned that European languages and Asian languages of today
are the great-granddaughters
of a common ancestor called the "Proto-Indo-European" language,
our ultimate mother tongue.
So they taught us to see connections within a language across centuries
and then among languages in general.
At this time, I received a scholarship to attend a private college in Virginia.
While there, I joined their touring choir and traveled to 15 countries for concerts.
One month before going to Ecuador,
I spent my lunch breaks drilling Spanish expressions
from a conversation guide which I got in the college library.
¿Cómo estás? ¿Cuantos años tienes?
Me llamo Adriana.
That kind of thing.
When I got to Ecuador,
I realized that I understood quite a bit of Spanish,
but speaking it was tough.
And then one day,
they left me without a translator with a group of local young people,
so I had to speak Spanish.
They gently corrected the endings of my words,
like the conjugation of verbs.
I had the word roots right,
from Romanian and French and Italian,
just not the right endings.
At one point, I was looking for the word "words" in Spanish,
and I just couldn't think of it.
So I took "parole" from French,
figured I should pronounce the ending -
as they usually do in Spanish -
roll my "r" and said "paroles."
They smiled and said, "Palabras,
(Laughter)
but we know what you mean,"
which taught me the similarities between languages can only take you so far.
After graduation, I worked in Romania as a translator for foreign investors
from Belgium, Holland, Switzerland and the United States.
And then I moved to Sweden.
I took a job there,
and for the first two years, I did not feel the need to learn Swedish;
I was living and working on an English-speaking campus.
But then I changed jobs.
This Worldcom reseller in Stockholm
hired me to speak French to their Belgian customers.
They did not care that I had no experience with their software.
They said, "You can learn our software in one week,
but we cannot teach you French in one week."
So,
I got a job in a country where I did not speak the language,
tripled my salary,
moved from the countryside to cool and hip Stockholm,
simply because I spoke French.
Oh, the places you will go if you only spoke another language.
And that's not all.
For the first month, they put me in the Swedish customer service
to listen in and to learn.
The first week, I did not get anything.
By the second week, I could recognize words here and there.
Two weeks later, they let me take calls in Swedish
while we were waiting for the lines to open with Belgium.
Of course, I immersed myself in Swedish outside of work hours,
through radio, newspapers, TV and evening classes.
Four months after I took this job in Stockholm,
a colleague overheard me pay a bill over the phone in Swedish.
And she said, "Hon sköter sin affär på svenska."
She takes care of her business in Swedish.
She was amazed; I was amazed.
That was the moment when I realized
I was no longer relying on English to get by in Sweden.
And really, once you have Swedish, you have Norwegian,
because they're very similar,
like American English versus British English.
Two other jobs brought me back to the United States,
first to Washington state
and then to Tennessee where I met my husband.
He's American,
so once we got married and became parents,
we decided to use OPOL - "One parent, one language."
It is a method to raise bilingual children.
He's been speaking to them in English,
and I've been speaking to them in Romanian, since birth.
As a result, our children our bilingual,
although English acts as the dominant language
and Romanian as the second language.
Two years ago, I started teaching them French.
They were four and six at the time.
I'm simply speaking to them - that's called immersion.
But we also use books, music, online courses and language videos.
One day they were watching this French-language video,
and a panda bear appeared on the screen at the end of the story
and asked, "Encore une fois?" - "One more time?" -
and my children shouted "da," which is "yes" in Romanian.
(Laughter)
Here I was trying to teach them French, and Romanian was coming out.
This reminded me of when I was in Sweden trying to learn Swedish,
and Spanish was coming to the forefront of my memory.
You see, Spanish had been the last language I had tried to learn.
Romanian, in my children's case, was the last language they had learned.
So the last language you studied is going to fight the newcomer.
I have this image in my mind of my brain as a cave
with the mother tongue tucked securely in the back,
and then all my other languages in different corridors in the middle,
and the last language I had studied at the mouth of the cave,
guarding the entrance.
Now, if you only speak one language,
your mother tongue is all over the cave of your brain -
in the back, in the middle, in the front;
your mother tongue will have you convinced that there is no room.
But if you study and persevere,
your brain will make room for another language.
Two more stories
about my children's adventures with multilingualism.
One day, they were arguing, as siblings often do,
in English,
and my daughter was asking my son for something - a toy.
They went back and forth several times,
and finally he got a tone and an attitude,
and he told her in Romanian, "În nici un caz,"
which means "Under no circumstance,"
and that was the end of the argument; she understood what he meant.
And I wonder where he got that tone and that expression from.
(Laughter)
Another time, I was spreading peanut butter on my daughter's bread,
and I was telling her in French, "Je mai du beurre de cacahuète,"
"I'm spreading peanut butter,"
and she looked up at me and said, "a cacahuète?"
And I said, "Yes, honey, that's 'peanut' in French."
And then she looked up at me again
and repeated the words with a pause in the middle
and with a big small on her face,
and she said, "But, mommy, caca? Wet?"
(Laughter)
Her brain had picked up, inside this French word,
her brain had picked up two other words:
"caca" is poop in Romanian,
and "wet" is the opposite of dry in English.
So she was having fun in three languages,
and she was four at the time,
which brings me to the many benefits of multilingualism,
fun being number one.
From babyhood into their senior years,
multilinguals go through life with added benefits.
They are better at switching tasks, and so they go with the flow better.
Their focus is better;
they produce higher standardized test scores;
they perform their work with higher brain efficiency
and then they exhibit a better memory and listening ability.
In their senior years,
multilinguals have a delayed onset of dementia.
By the way, all these studies have been done around the world
on bilinguals and multilinguals;
the statements I just made
are the conclusions of research done around the world.
Professionally, multilinguals have a competitive edge
over people who, otherwise, would have the same qualifications.
And then there are the social advantages:
You can, for example, get amazing hot sauces,
which are not listed on the menu in a Mexican restaurant,
because you ordered your food in Spanish.
You can break the ice with people in their native language.
Once, I met an Italian gentleman in an English-speaking context,
and I told him, "I'm a big fan of Italian music,
especially the music of Eros Ramazzotti,"
and I proceeded to recite for him words from "Adesso tu,"
one of Ramazzotti's early songs.
"Nato ai bordi di periferia Dove I tram non vanno avanti più
Dove l'aria è popolare È più facile sognare
Che guardare in faccia la realtà"
He asked me, "Do you understand what you are saying?"
So I had to translate for him:
"Born at the edges of the suburbs where the trams don't go any farther,
where the air is popular,
it is easier to dream than to face reality."
He loved it, and the ice had been broken.
Last but not least, multilinguals are multicultural.
It is impossible to learn another language without learning something
about the culture that speaks that language.
We fear what we don't know.
Imagine what our world would be like
if we feared each other a little bit less
because we knew each other a little bit more
through language learning?
So, what about you?
Would you like to learn another language?
Here's what to do:
For the first month, set aside 15 minutes per day
and study only free resources from the internet and your local library.
Learn some grammar,
drill some vocabulary,
watch a movie in your target language,
listen to music, read a basic book in your target language.
Once you establish the habit,
invest in a good paper dictionary and a traditional method.
Now, remember,
proficiency in a language is a ten-thousand-hour skill,
and language learning happens in levels.
If you can, at some point, hire a language coach -
that would be great.
Now, I promise you that the more languages you know,
the farther you will go.
Just like Vlad Dracula.
Thank you.
(Applause)