I'd say you know nothing about networking until you get that there is nothing special about those “special” IP addresses. Or non-contiguous subnet masks. Or /32

I'd say you know nothing about networking until you get that there is nothing special about those “special” IP addresses. Or non-contiguous subnet masks. Or /32 — on both sides of point-to-point links. Subnets don't really exist, only network cards that apply masks to what they send and receive do exist. After that you can gather some experience on why something can go wrong with that. Then you can discover some networks that only pretend to be a shared ether, like Wi-Fi, where access point captures and analyzes transmissions with multiple destinations to decide which are first class and are worthy of re-transmitting, to answer directly on its own, or even convert one protocol into another.