I'm a Slovak. And when I was growing up, I believed that I was Czechoslovakian because of what Russia did. They came in and took two separate countries - Slovakia and the Czech Republic - put them together as one.
I talk about it a lot to my students. Musicality never came up in any of own writing education, and I can see why - we don't have the vocabulary for it. Phrasing is intuitive, and its difficult to articulate when it's on and when it's not.