"you don't need to be fluent in a lot of different languages to be a linguist" is "you don't need to have built a house with your own hands to be an engineer"

true in principle but it makes such a difference in your work

@apophis im gonna build a shed

@coolbean that's the spirit!

one of my biggest regrets in life was letting myself buy into the lie of not just valuing higher, nobler, more abstract things, but treating them as more real the higher you go

that it was better to know the highest principles of things and deduce things from them than to work with real things and ground my sense of what is truth and what is bullshit in repeated practical observation

basic techbro moment

https://www.reddit.com...

@apophis like this https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/everyone-into-the-grinder

@apophis https://www.tigertigercomic.com/tiger-tiger/057

i was at a linguistics olympiad once during highschool and there was a task regarding some malayic language and yeah the fact that i knew two indonesian words and that repeating word-word twice makes it plural was a big starting boost, instead of guessing what it is and then proving it i could just assume it as true and move onwards. obviously, this isn't exactly real life linguistics but it really turned it from just a hard puzzle to a hard puzzle but you get a bonus if you know about obscure languages (malayic languages aren't that obscure, they're actually super common, but you get the idea, i hope). so not even fluent can help i guess

@risperdoll not sure how it relates to my post but yeah i'll boost that