In March 2020, at the door of Boston Logan, I asked my Uber driver to turn around. Then, stuck in traffic on the way back, I asked him to turn around again. That 180 across the highway is why this product exists.
February 2020. I was working for the same publicly traded tech company I work for now, and I still had a car then — commuting it daily from Andover to Cambridge. Word started going around that we'd eventually have to work from home; some virus. In early March it was instituted, supposedly just for a week. It was a month, or maybe it kept shifting — nobody's records of that spring are exact.
What I heard in "no office until April" was not epidemiology. There was a girl I liked from Romania, and I told her I could visit her now.
As for the rumors of a plague: I didn't pay them much attention. I trusted my immune system — I had practiced water fasting, one week, two weeks, three weeks — and figured that whatever might be contracted would meet a body that had already been through worse on purpose. You can decide for yourself whether that was the same reasoning that built this product or just youth. I no longer fully distinguish them.
The Uber to Logan was from Andover. At the dropoff I asked the driver — Hector — to turn around. I didn't feel good about the decision. I was scared I had lung pain, or that I had hallucinated lung pain, which in March 2020 amounted to the same thing.
Then Hector hit traffic on the way back. Sitting in it, I told him to just turn around — I'd be flying after all. He did a 180 onto the other side of the highway, and that sealed the deal. My resolve had failed in both directions and a man named Hector executed the tiebreak.
At the airport the gate had nearly closed and credit cards were no longer accepted. I paid cash for a ticket to Frankfurt. And bam — I am who I am today.
Frankfurt for two days, then a flight to Bucharest, rerouted through Munich, which meant a night at the Mövenpick. In the hotel restaurant they were playing Sinatra — Somethin' Stupid. It's a love song; it's about saying the thing that ruins the evening. I noticed it because on one level I knew perfectly well I was doing something stupid — slyly knew it, and liked it. I had chosen to live dangerously.
The concierge asked if I was going home. I said, naively: no — I'm going to Romania. I was not yet aware of the political fear proper to that moment, the one everyone else seemed to have been issued at the border. She would meet me in Bucharest.
The romantic weekend became three months. And when everything seemed on the verge of implosion — borders, flights, the general shape of the world — I chose not to go home to the United States. I stayed in Romania, on my own.
That is where the language actually happened. Not in the romance — in the solitude after it. Single in Bucharest in the summer of 2020, strolling down Calea Victoriei, living a great life in fire-sale priced Airbnbs, in a country I had discovered almost by accident and had come to appreciate independent of any person I associated with it. Lacking a visa, with rumors of return-to-office starting, I left in September — perhaps prematurely. But I kept the language.
I continued Romanian online, and here I have to tell on myself: I have a tendency to overestimate my ability, to be much too proud for my true competence. I wanted the lecturers to skip the drills and do just conversation, though I was barely competent to hold one. Through late 2020 and early 2021 I got humiliated in online courses, politely and repeatedly, because my listening was simply less than I believed it to be.
I had made a financial commitment to the lectures. I was held accountable by the human relationships in that online classroom. And I wanted not merely to do better — I wanted to solve, permanently, the problem of underperforming my own expectations.
The diagnosis was obvious once pride stopped obstructing it: to learn by conversation, you must first be able to hear. Vastly improve the listening and the rest follows.
So I built myself a dictation-only tool. The first version ran on synthetic voices — text-to-speech reading Romanian sentences at me. It worked, in the way a treadmill works: correctly and joylessly.
Then, while looking for nothing more than another robot voice to read Romanian, I stumbled onto the work of Adriana Stan and her colleagues — a research speech corpus, actual human Romanian, recorded for science rather than commerce. That was the treasure trove. I wove it together with spaced repetition, borrowing Clozemaster's scheduling algorithm, and the rest is history. Mozilla Common Voice I only discovered much later, in 2022 — which is why the Romanian version of this product remains unique among its languages: it stands on two great corpora, one from the research world and one from the commons, arrived at years apart, both by accident.
I am writing this from Bucharest. The commute is Bucharest to Boston now — outcome to be determined. The app that came out of that humiliation is in your browser and on your phone, and the Romanian in it is still the best thing it does, for reasons this post should make plain: it was never a product decision. It was a U-turn on a highway median, executed by a man named Hector, who I hope is doing well.
— brought to you from the shores of Lake Floreasca