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.