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.