Opinion: How learning a language can inform musical practice

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Like almost everyone else I know, I am learning a language using Duolingo. I have been at it for two years and am currently on a 37-day streak (yes, life sometimes breaks the continuity). If I am busy in the day, I receive a string of increasingly irate emails from Duolingo reminding me that learning a language needs daily practice for a successful outcome.

My learning comprises two parts online (revision, then learning new material) and one part offline, away from Duolingo, talking to a teacher face to face. As I go, I find myself critiquing my learning process. For a start, my progress disappoints me. I am horrified how much repetition I need to do to remember the simplest phrases reliably – not necessarily on the day I encounter them, but in subsequent days. New phrases are exciting, but tricky to drum in. The moment of reckoning comes when I converse with my teacher – that’s when my ability to recall what I have learnt seems to fall off a cliff, no doubt because I am trying to remember how to say things at the same time as making them cogent in real time…