easier than it used to be.

I had a go at the first 4 bars of Bach's Cello Suite #1, and while my teacher was very kind, suggested that I save it for later on down the road.

Duolingo has been fun for Swedish, so I decided to start in on French as well--only half-jokingly as prep for our eventual emigration to Canada. I'm developing a theory that if you've got a knack for languages, they get easier to learn as you know more of them. Anna, for example, studied Arabic and can often make some sense out of Hebrew (both Semitic languages, though not every speaker is ready to hear that). She's an absurdly gifted language learner--she can have conversations in Arabic, Russian, and Turkish, and describes Arabic as "not that hard"--but even the rest of us can learn to see and hear the connections.

In high school it took a single French class to decide that with my solid Spanish, I would find French classes boring for the first long while. After "Enchantée" I figured I could just learn it whenever I needed it. And indeed French is not wildly different from Spanish, as these things go.

(Growing up, I learned that "the Romance languages" were Spanish, French, Italian, and then Romanian. There are dozens! They're not even all defunct, by a long shot.)

Swedish is getting real now. The thing to know about Duolingo is that there's a lot of different kinds of repetition, and also it is partly auto-generated, leading to some not-quite-sensible sentences. I unlocked Duolingo's Animals vocabulary section, which gave me:

• Det är en älg. - "It is a moose."
• Hon har en björn. - "She has a bear."

Both of which pretty much made my day.

"Älg" is pronounced suspiciously like "elk," which was a fun project:

• Why is it translated as "moose"?
• Are there even moose in Europe?
• What do they call the thing that I call an "elk"?

It's a pretty straightforward case of early Europeans going "hey, that looks vaguely like something I know, I'll just call it that." (Moose: established on every sub-Arctic continent. Elk/wapiti: North America and...Northeast Asia?)

Unlike when I was on a boat tour in Chile and the guide said there was a coipú swimming nearby. My dictionary was no help, but I watched it and thought "pretty sure that's a nutria." The Spanish borrowed the native Mapuche word, because... nutria in Spanish already meant "otter."

Shit like this is why Latin scientific names were immediately so important.

there's an idea.

Yo-Yo Ma did this great NPR Tiny Desk Concert where he plays the first movement of Bach's Cello Suites, and explains that was the first thing he learned on the cello.

"Well," I think. "That's interesting."

I've been learning Swedish using the Duolingo iPhone app.

(Why Swedish, when I'm a quarter Norwegian? It was a Swedish neo-folk song that sent me off learning the violin. Norwegian music has too much accordion. Also, the food is better.)

It's goofy to learn a language without practicing conversation, but for what it is, it seems to be decent. It has you translate stuff back and forth in different ways, and ramps up to listening and vocabulary-building. It's an incremental process. I guess I'll start in on French, to help us emigrate to Canada when the time comes.

(Swedish is awesome, by the way. It helps that I know enough about languages to understand what I'm looking at: instead of a definite article, like English "the" or Spanish la, the noun inflects, so en kvinna is "a woman," but kvinnan is "the woman." Old hat to you poor sods who took Latin, of course, which does this in spades.)

It got me thinking, though, that if 4-year old Yo-Yo Ma could learn Cello Suite #1 a measure at a time, maybe I could too. Bach has always been a favorite of transcriptionists everywhere, and it's not like transposing across the violin family is at all difficult. And those first few lines, if you take some deep breaths, aren't super hard.

One measure at a time.