lots of surprises.

I'm not sure how many people pick up the violin because of Swedish folk music. Outside of Sweden, and possibly Minnesota, probably not many. I'm actually not sure there's many inside of Sweden, either: tons of people (possibly most) spending their time performing folk fiddling traditions have music degrees and/or started playing as children, and after mastering the classical tradition, either returned again to the music of their childhoods, or learned it for the first time and found it more satisfying.

Don't get me wrong: I like Irish and Scottish fiddling, and Cape Breton, and bluegrass, and old-time. And Quèbecois, although I think you have to be able to dance while playing, so it will probably remain beyond me: the percussion in this track is the fiddler chair-clogging.

I don't really care for Cajun or zydeco fiddling, except in moderation, but I won't claim there's any logic to that, because it all sounds repetitive and similar to me, which is equally well said of most fiddle music I do like, to say nothing of lots of other music I enjoy.

Of course, all those fiddle traditions (and more!) are one family, carried from France and Ireland and Scotland over to Canada and Appalachia and Louisiana, mixing with everything they encountered, like Spaniards, enslaved Africans, and each other. Like any instrument unconstrained by the tyrannies of fixed pitch, the violin is tailor-made for musical syncretism. Want to play music with quarter-tones? If you can hear the difference, and remember where you put your fingers, the violin will play it for you.

Owing to Scandinavia's failure to thoroughly colonize the Americas, Scandinavian fiddle music is...something else. And then within Scandinavia, as far as I can tell, Swedish music is weird. The thing that grabbed me about Swedish music is the same thing that makes it hard: everything about it is just unexpected. I have all these decades of listening to classical and Irish music (and Cajun, until admitting I didn't like it), but I listen to Swedish music, and I constantly feel like I had NO IDEA that note was coming. To say nothing of the rhythms: a Swedish polka is the Polish polka we're used to, in 2/4 time, but the Swedes have a polska, which sounds like this:

Notwithstanding that the band is a supergroup of Swedish Folk Revival ninjas, this is a Christmas concert for normal people, and this is the kind of music the audience is expecting. The musician Lena Jonsson (not in that concert) described the polska as "in 3/4, but the second beat comes sooner," which is enough to make most of us ordinary (and non-jazz) musicians cry out to the heavens. "WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT EVEN MEAN, THAT IS NOT WHAT A BEAT IS."

It's more of a pulse, and it's part of why the email from the local Nordic music ensemble told me to use the sheet music as a starting point, but not to invest too much time in it, since the band plays whatever it plays and mostly uses the music to remember how songs start.

I highly recommend watching the whole concert. It's so different, but so damn catchy.

sköldpaddan dricker vatten.

I'm having fun with Swedish. Our next-door neighbors are a very nice Danish couple, so I decided to check out Danish on Duolingo as well. (I was about to write "as a lark," but that sort of represents everything I do with my spare time.) There's a certain level of mutual intelligibility among Swedish/Danish/Norwegian, so I thought I'd see for myself. It's interesting, of course: the words for "man" and "woman" are cognate (man/mand and kvinna/kvinde), but "boy" and "girl" are not (pojke/dreng and flicka/pigin).

(I had to stop both Danish and Norwegian: all the words are too close together for me to keep track, and I also don't trust Duolingo's pronunciation across the three.)

I bestirred myself to actually look up Swedish's indefinite articles (translated as English "a/an"), en and ett. One Swedish teacher writes that there used to be three, formerly labeled masculine/feminine/neuter, but then they simplified and now about 75% of things are en, and the remainder ett. These come in handy for forming the definite article form ("the"), so ett äpple becomes äpplet, and en björn becomes björnen.

The rules get more complicated with plurals and then definite plurals, depending on the final vowel (or occasionally consonant?) in the word. Duolingo doesn't help with this: it's fun, but it's best not to confuse it with learning a language, exactly, since it neither focuses on useful phrases, nor explains rules nor grammar. I mean, do I know more Swedish now than I ever expected to? Sure, and I love learning stuff. But, Duolingo clearly has algorithms driving much of its learning, and may have topped its previous best sentence:

Hon har en älg. / "She has a moose."

With a new contender:

Björnen tycker om vegetarianen. / "The bear likes the vegetarian."

Though once I get off the plane in Stockholm, I will definitely look for a chance to use either of those.

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.