L2 vs. L3, etc.

When I was an exchange student in my junior year of college, I (as exchange students have been known to do) struggled with the local language. (Let’s call the language L2.) Because there is always more to learn—more automaticity to gain with grammatical accuracy, more pockets of vocabulary for this topic or that, more everything—I didn’t appreciate the progress I was making with L2 until I traveled to a couple of neighboring countries where the languages were different.

In Neighboring Country 1, the language (call it L3) was one that I had studied before but neglected during my exchange year. I got by fine as a tourist in L3, but often when I was speaking L3, bits of L2 would come out instead. Sometimes I didn't notice that until people looked at me funny; I'd internalized L2 in ways I hadn't realized.

In Neighboring Country 2, the language (call it L4) was completely unrelated to L2 or L3 or English. I couldn’t begin to read signs, understand numbers, or any of the more basic things you can sometimes do in a language that’s related to one you have studied. Traveling in the country where L4 was spoken was fun in the usual ways that travel can be, but also exhausting. Coming “home” to my host country and L2 felt like a huge relief. Finally, I could see my struggles with L2 paying off and could appreciate the level of proficiency I had developed.

Something similar happened tonight in returning to the first movement of the Bach A minor violin concerto. A few weeks ago I hit a plateau in my progress with it, and was getting rather tired of flailing away at it. For the past two weeks or so, I have barely touched it while ramping up my work on the third movement.

Tonight, though, after appreciating some of the challenges of the third movement, I decided to come back to the first. I played through the first page, then a bit of the middle. My intonation had slipped a bit, but in terms of flow, it suddenly sounded smoother than I’d ever played it. I also was better able to imagine it in terms of lines or phrases—you know, like music or something—instead of experiencing it as a sequence of multidimensional physical problems (hit this shift while distributing my bow properly while keeping my right thumb bent while crescendo-ing, then keep crescendo-ing and cross strings smoothly and and and and…).

I’m not saying that my playing reflected the music I imagined, but I was drawn into that movement again, encouraged by signs of progress, and just flat out had fun practicing it.