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Wow, great to see this site on there. When I was a teenager the Language Construction Toolkit is what got me into Linguistics and completing a degree in it: htt
by cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
Wow, great to see this site on there. When I was a teenager the Language Construction Toolkit is what got me into Linguistics and completing a degree in it: https://www.zompist.com/lckbook.html https://www.zompist.com/lckbook.html
When I say I have a degree in linguistics inevitably I'm asked "How many languages do you speak?" which is a question that I think most people with linguistic degrees roll their eyes at. Linguistics is very, very different than learning a language and even applied linguistics is just a subcategory of it.
What I typically say is that I'm awful at learning languages. I believe very strongly from both the research that I've seen and anecdotally that someone's aptitude for learning a language has a hell of a lot more to do with someone being an extrovert who likes new experiences and doesn't have anxiety. I am bad at learning languages because I am awkward and asocial. My favorite language to learn was Sanskrit because it felt like "decoding" something versus the social/anxiety producing "production" aspect of languages.
With the skills I do have though, depending on how much work I put into it, I can probably get better at comprehension in reading more quickly than most people because I like the "decoding" aspect.