ネイティブが教える英会話のジェムスクール☆Teachers☆

I graduated with my master's in Linguistics a little over two years ago, and if I am being honest, I have not really utilized the skills I acquired through the degree since then, which is something that I regret more and more as time marches on. So this past week, I have decided that I will begin to sharpen the specific problem solving skills I learned in the major by attempting problems from both the International Linguistics Olympiad and the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad; these are competitions for secondary school students, but the problems are designed by professional linguists and in fact can be quite challenging for even professionals to solve (according to discussions on the respective websites).

So far I have done about three of them, and have gotten all the correct answers, which, I am not going to lie, has made me pretty ecstatic. The skills required to solve any of these problems are really domain agnostic, but are ones that are sharpened by studying linguistics in the form of narrowly designed problem sets. These skills are: various reasoning skills (abductive, deductive, and inductive), data analysis, pattern recognition, hypothesis formation and testing, and lateral thinking. Below is an example of the type of problems that one may encounter in this Olympiad, and it is one that I solved last week - it is classified as an intermediate problem, but I found it WAY easier.