People are differently good at linguistic skills. My experience in yeshiva demonstrated this to me. Aramaic is a language related to Hebrew, and in yeshiva it is very, very often read and never written or spoken, nor are new thoughts generated in it. Hebrew is used in Israel, the outside world for Americans learning in Israel, so it will be read frequently, and spoken and heard sometimes. English will be how Americans communicate with each other, even when learning things in Hebrew or Aramic. Yiddish is heard and spoken to various degrees in different places.
One guy at my yeshiva was, as a gimmick or parlor trick, able to speak fluently about mundane topics in (Babylonian Jewish) Aramaic without any paying any special attention to trying to learn to do it, in a way that seemed magical to me. This guy also learned to understand, read, speak, and write in Yiddish and Hebrew with apparently zero effort. In general, he wasn’t very smart. Some non-Americans developed perfect understanding of spoken English without being able to speak much at all. Some native Hebrew speakers were able to read Aramaic after just a bit of practice, others learned much more slowly than even average English speakers, as the Hebrew speakers were confounded by the similarities amid differences. And, of course, most people had their separate skills in a language partially correlated instead of entirely correlated or uncorrelated, and their Aramaic and Hebrew skills loosely correlated.
The stereotypical case is of an illiterate person who can’t read or write, making one think that those skills are inherently harder than listening or speaking. I don’t think that any of the four skills is inherently the hardest or easiest for all humans.
I expect people’s ability to learn rot13 to vary greatly.
The webcomic “Order of the Stick”. for a while, had a character who was unable to speak intelligibly as the result of a curse. This character’s speech bubbles were full of meaningless strings of letters. However, as I read it it became pretty clear that there was some kind of substitution going on. It was a simple substitution cipher, so it was possible with some effort to make sense of this character’s dialogue. The cipher would change every few strips, and I’m not aware of any clue or key given within the comic itself.
Figuring out how to read this had a little to do with knowing the typical frequency of letters in English, but was probably more down to context (predicting what the character might say) and the fact that the length and capitalization of the words remained intact.
I just checked an old episode there, and was very quickly able to decipher the unintelligible dialogue, but this was almost entirely down to knowing the context. I remember when I initially read it, I more or less memorized the ciphers without specific effort.
Predicting what a rot13ed text might say could be a factor, and in my experience it was not particularly difficult to assimilate similar ciphers once I was reasonably confident my decryptions were correct.
How does one happen to acquire this skill?
Presumably by practice. I am careful to always use rot13.com rather than decoding mentally, to prevent myself from accidentally picking up the skill.
People are differently good at linguistic skills. My experience in yeshiva demonstrated this to me. Aramaic is a language related to Hebrew, and in yeshiva it is very, very often read and never written or spoken, nor are new thoughts generated in it. Hebrew is used in Israel, the outside world for Americans learning in Israel, so it will be read frequently, and spoken and heard sometimes. English will be how Americans communicate with each other, even when learning things in Hebrew or Aramic. Yiddish is heard and spoken to various degrees in different places.
One guy at my yeshiva was, as a gimmick or parlor trick, able to speak fluently about mundane topics in (Babylonian Jewish) Aramaic without any paying any special attention to trying to learn to do it, in a way that seemed magical to me. This guy also learned to understand, read, speak, and write in Yiddish and Hebrew with apparently zero effort. In general, he wasn’t very smart. Some non-Americans developed perfect understanding of spoken English without being able to speak much at all. Some native Hebrew speakers were able to read Aramaic after just a bit of practice, others learned much more slowly than even average English speakers, as the Hebrew speakers were confounded by the similarities amid differences. And, of course, most people had their separate skills in a language partially correlated instead of entirely correlated or uncorrelated, and their Aramaic and Hebrew skills loosely correlated.
The stereotypical case is of an illiterate person who can’t read or write, making one think that those skills are inherently harder than listening or speaking. I don’t think that any of the four skills is inherently the hardest or easiest for all humans.
I expect people’s ability to learn rot13 to vary greatly.
A more lowbrow example:
The webcomic “Order of the Stick”. for a while, had a character who was unable to speak intelligibly as the result of a curse. This character’s speech bubbles were full of meaningless strings of letters. However, as I read it it became pretty clear that there was some kind of substitution going on. It was a simple substitution cipher, so it was possible with some effort to make sense of this character’s dialogue. The cipher would change every few strips, and I’m not aware of any clue or key given within the comic itself.
Figuring out how to read this had a little to do with knowing the typical frequency of letters in English, but was probably more down to context (predicting what the character might say) and the fact that the length and capitalization of the words remained intact.
I just checked an old episode there, and was very quickly able to decipher the unintelligible dialogue, but this was almost entirely down to knowing the context. I remember when I initially read it, I more or less memorized the ciphers without specific effort.
Predicting what a rot13ed text might say could be a factor, and in my experience it was not particularly difficult to assimilate similar ciphers once I was reasonably confident my decryptions were correct.