Winning Silver Award in IOLC! (International Olympiad Linguistics China) -- my thoughts of linguistics study

I attended the International Olympics Linguistics China this year.

In the open round I got the first prize. In the final round, though unfortunately, I caught gastroenteritis, I still won the silver medal in China. Perhaps this ‘failure’ is also a reminder of the importance of being healthy. Alright, honestly, it is a unique experience to take part in this competition and I would like to record it in this blog.

As for the subject of linguistics itself, I got a brief understanding of what and how linguist study. I read several materials of this subject to get some professional knowledge, and I also experience the way linguists sum up rules from the corpus through the process of solving problems in the competition. Besides the subject itself, I tried to explore the connections between subjects either. For instance, I found a clear logic could be quite helpful when solving problems. I need to record my inspirations and my ideas, to make sure that I can find the rule step by step. What’s more, it is literally surprising that I also found that it is easier for me to understand the problems and materials in the Chinese, political and history exams. I reckon that this is because as I got a deeper understanding of the structure of sentences and words, I became more confident and less confused when reading long and obscure articles.

About the exercise I have done for preparation, I did several past papers to get familiar with the possible problems that I need to solve. Also, I searched for some professional books and videos that give some tips of how to be more competitive in this match. I organized the academic knowledge that I had learned into mind maps and notes, and added new key points as soon as I met them in the process of doing past papers. My deskmate Angle took part in IOLC too, thus we often share the difficult problems we found with each other. I really enjoy this process of exercising.

It is a pity that we don’t have a team match because of the virus. If I’m going to take part in the IOLC in the next year, I will definitely try to do some group works with my teammates.

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