I’ve always believed that passions make people bond beyond cultural and ideological barriers.

The story I tell in our book  about my encounter with a Kazakh immigration officer only a few years after the end of the Cold War is an example.

Last weekend, I found another one.

I was reading an article  in The New York Times about the anniversary of Isaac Stern’s  trip to China.

The famous violinist toured the country in 1979 giving concerts. People travelled miles by train to see him perform. This happened at a crucial time. China was emerging from a long period of isolation from the rest of the world.

Stern  is credited not only with spreading the love for classical music but also with enabling cultural exchanges between the West and a country everybody had learned to fear.

You have to watch the video  about Stern teaching young Ho Hongying to play the violin. It contains one of the best lessons in cross-cultural communications I have ever come across.

Without knowing a word of Mandarin, Stern manages to tap into Hongying’s passion for music and, instantly, her performance improves.

What would be the equivalent of this in corporate communication?

Our spirit cannot travel as fast as our body. That’s how someone explained jet lag to me.

I just got back from San Francisco and my spirit is all over the place. Although I have been desperately trying to tie it to the cup of Ghirardelli coffee on my desk,  my mind keeps replaying many of the conversations I heard last week in California.

One bit keeps coming back again and again.

Sir Ken Robinson, the innovation expert, was talking at IABC’s conference about the ability of human beings to learn foreign languages.

His take is pretty much that if you don’t learn a foreign language at an early age, your chance to be able to do it in your 20s is slim.

What a sad and elitist view…

And this coming from an otherwise inspiring speaker.

If Sir Ken is right, this would mean that only those children who have the fortune to travel or live abroad or grow up in a multicultural household, will be able to speak other languages and function in a multicultural setting.

Luckily, this is not how the world of tomorrow is likely to turn out.

China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world. I believe not all the Chinese who are studying English today have learned it from their parents or by travelling abroad.

The ability to develop a passion for communicating with other cultures and learning foreign languages is not a prerogative of the more fortunate and has never been.

Take the example of Billy Wilder who grew up in Austria-Hungary speaking German, had to escape first to France and then to America in the 1930s, learned French and English in his 20s and went on to write the screenplay of what is considered an icon of American film making.

Thank God for “Some Like It Hot”!  

I am aware that one could write an encyclopedia about the A-word. This is why I really enjoyed Yang-May’s podcast on her two voices.

I have always been fascinated by accents until they became such an integral part of my life that I started developing a love-and-hate relationship with them. I now refer to them as the A-word. Speaking five languages has done interesting things to mine.

This is why I was not surprised when, last year, the A-word followed me all the way to Norway.

I was sitting in the cozy lobby of a hotel in Lillehammer, talking on my mobile phone in an agitated German about the fate of a friend in Prague. Across the coffee table from me, two Israeli grandmas were debating the pros and cons of braving the snow outside to go buy souvenirs in town. But something more interesting came up…. One of the two understood German and began translating the contents of my anguished monologue to her friend.

When, at the peak of the outrage, I uttered the word Schweinerei (how disgusting..), the two ladies really got into it, with a passion I thought they would reserve only for their favorite Polish soap.

At some point in my frantic conversation, the battery of my phone decided to give up on me. I sighted and stood up to go continue the live commentary of my friend’s destiny in my hotel room.
“Sind Sie aus Wien?” (Are you from Vienna?), one of the ladies spoke a very sweet German from a world that, unfortunately, is no more.

I answered that I wasn’t, but that I had studied in Austria.

The other granny threw me a serious look from the middle of her wrinkled face : “Yor akcent gives ya avay!”

Does it?

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a function in the European Parliament sailing my way around the buffet, when I got introduced to an Irishman. A handshake followed by the usual pleasantries.

“I thought you were Italian…You sound like an English oppressor”. His face twisted in semi-horror.

“You don’t know how happy I am to hear that…”

His look escalated into full-scale horror.

Actually, it did make me happy, but for reasons that do not have anything to do with centuries-old blood feuds, ships sailing to America or leprecauns.

For most of my life, my father (who used to teach English) has had this infatuation with British accents. He gave up on me years ago when, after a long summer spent in the US, a friend told him I sounded like his next-door neighbor from Jacksonville, Florida.

My fellow raider-of -the-buffet at the European Parliament really made my day that evening and filled my heart with joy - an emotion seldom encountered in the sterile halls of the European Parliament.

However, sailing under the wrong flag has its limits.

Last winter, I was having dinner with an English friend in Paris, in one of those bistros with tables so close to each other that you could try on your neighbor’s shoes without much effort. And I would have loved to do so, since sitting next to me was a very fashion-conscious couple from Rome.

I have this tendency to get sucked into other people’s conversations (I worked for too long as a journalist: once an observer, always an observer…). The Romans were carrying on a conversations about the virtues of the thermal waters of a town on lake Garda where I used to be sent to as a child.

“Are you still taking the Acqua di Sirmione…? Your snoring is getting better…” a perfectly manicured hand patted the proud husband’s cheek

Half of my brain was looking forward to the rest of this conversation. But my face must have revealed the painful effort of retrieving pictures of muddy waters from the most remote corners of my memory. The couple sensed an energetic wave of inte
rest coming from our table.

“Ma, ste’ qua so proprio inglesi” (These two are really English), the hand made a gesture in our direction revealing a rather expensive ring.

The husband raised his head, took a good look at my face, swallowed a piece of shrimp rather abruptly and did not return to the subject of his nocturnal musical performances…

So much for the lure of the A-word!