Usually, people imagine progress as something very clear, very linear as they start the violin. You learn a piece, you practice it, and it becomes progressively better. The improvement seems obvious. Yet violin is not linear, it evolves through a much more intricate system in which coordination, listening, and control are learned separately and then brought together. This is exactly the reason that most beginners feel like you are not making much of any progress at all, despite working quite hard.
Fundamentally, playing violin consists of learning two distinct hands. At least the bow hand and the fingering hand are separate entities that do not naturally want to work together. The bow hand needs to learn how to manage bowing, how to create even sounds, and to control pressure. The finger hand has to learn where to place the fingers, when to move them, and how much to press down. Your brain has to learn to process sound information from your ear to guide all of this, and for many weeks (or even months) this information is still very unreliable.
You end up in a strange situation when your two hands are still learning, your ear is still unreliable, your brain has to learn how to listen to what your hands are doing, and then it has to try to make all of them work together. This can lead to the feeling that the learning is taking forever. You are practicing the same pieces day after day, but it feels like you are learning nothing new, but this illusion is because all of the learning that you do every day, the learning is taking place at a microscopic level. The brain does not notice every single day small changes in where the bow changes direction, changes in where the fingers go, changes in how your hand and arm muscles are contracting and releasing. These things happen, but the brain does not always realize it, because the brain wants to coordinate first, and then start improving accuracy after that.
This means the progress you make on violin is often invisible.
Another important aspect about learning the violin is that there is usually a time delay in the feedback that you receive. If you are learning something that has an immediate feedback, your results are very obvious and immediate. But with violin, sometimes your note sounds “almost” there but not yet. Your rhythm sounds good when you are playing, but it does not feel right to your brain and when you play it, you hear some weird wobbles, but this is very hard to notice if you are playing yourself, and if you listen to someone else’s rhythm, you do not hear them very well. The feedback is often very delayed. This means the brain has to keep correcting itself to a very subtle detail, but does not get very explicit confirmation from the feedback loop. This delay makes it feel like learning takes much longer than it does.
The most significant hidden aspect that determines how fast you learn violin is that when you learn anything, you have to learn new actions. You must know what to do when your brain learns a new action, but sometimes the brain learns a new movement but does not know the movement is wrong, and so when you do the movement, you do it again and again, and the brain records it as “this is how we do it,” which means you have to learn new things and replace old automatic behaviors. This explains why violin is not always progressing, you may sometimes be improving quickly, and other times it feels like you are “fighting yourself.” This is because when you practice something, it is important for you to understand that you are learning, when you repeat something without paying attention to how your fingers or bow, how you change the direction of your fingers or the pressure of your bow changes the sound, or how the location of your fingers on the strings changes the sound, you cannot improve.
Once you start paying attention to how your hands work, and when you notice how small changes you make change how the music sounds, you have started learning, you no longer practice mindlessly, you start paying attention to what you are doing, you can actually see and feel that your violin playing is changing.
Finally, there is a psychological aspect of learning violin that most people do not know about. You can feel that you are making progress, yet everything still sounds a bit off. The reason for that is violin is very sensitive to playing, even if your playing improves, even a slight change in pitch or slight difference in dynamics, is noticeable and you notice that. Because violin is so responsive to your playing, small mistakes are noticeable, you notice when you make the mistake, you notice when your hand goes up and down when it should not, you notice when your bow changes direction when it should not, or your hand is tense, you notice all of the problems. This is why you feel like you are making mistakes, even as you are improving. Because violin is so sensitive, you notice all of your mistakes, because your ear is better than your hands are, so you notice them all, but they are all improving much faster than your ability to control them, so they will eventually sound better, but for now they sound worse.
At the same time, your brain is learning to coordinate, listen, and control at a more automatic level. This coordination, this listening, and this control become much easier and much more natural. What once required great effort and great focus is now just a normal thing you do. This happens very slowly, but when it happens, your playing suddenly sounds better. You may not have realized exactly what changed, but all of these pieces finally began to fit together.
The reason is simple: the more aligned the three systems (action, perception, time) are, the more stable everything is. This means that when all of the three systems are aligned, all three can function more smoothly, and you can play more smoothly. You can play much better, but you cannot make these systems align overnight. You will need to practice consistently, to focus on each small thing, and to practice over a long period of time. When all of these are in place, you will notice an improvement in your playing, not because you are playing the same thing faster, but because your brain, your muscles, and your listening have started to work together. Once this happens, improvement becomes inevitable.