I love that you're a self-taught linguist! What websites or books did you use to learn from?
— asked by nattym29
Honestly? Endless googling. It’s really hard to define how I do it because I’m also cheap, so I’m not buying myself textbooks or reference guides very often.
However, I do own two good books: The Language Construction Kit, and A Comprehensive French Grammar. The LCK is designed for conlanging, but in doing that you have to understand a lot of the linguistics behind your language, and that book presents it all to a beginner pretty nicely. I got myself a reference grammar for French because a) I’m going to be a French and Linguistics major, so it seemed smart and b) I think it’s useful to have at least one reference grammar, if only to see how they’re set up and how detailed they can be (that particular one has over 700 facets of the French language, delineated very clearly and very precisely with a kickass index).
Other than that, I use the reference lists and external links sections from Wikipedia pages, and lots of semi-random websites that look academically reliable. It’s an acquired skill, I guess, but that’s what self-teaching is all about!
