> Have you tried Duolingo? It's free, and it's less than 10 minutes a day.

Thanks, no, I haven't heard of this. I will try it for sure!

> I sincerely doubt you spoke your first word at 3 months old, and there's no way in hell you were using coherent sentences at 6 months old.

When my grandmother told me this, I called total bullshit. But then I asked around and all my relatives and neighbours corroborated this. Since this was so unusual, they were so impressed at the time that they could remember specific conversations we supposedly had. Yes, parents and auts exagerate these things, but random neighbours?

I still found this hard to believe, but there are documented cases about people doing this[1].

I was a very gifted child, I learned to read somewhere around two years of age by studying the book while my mother or grandmother read to me. I also learned arithmetic by watching people use cash at the store. Numbers were so fascinating to me that somehow my parents got me a cash register to play with.

These things I remember clearly. Nobody thought me these things, I figured them out myself.

I was fascinated with money. I had a bank (actually my cash register) where my mother would put all the change. I charged a fee for both deposit and withdrawl, but I paid interest too. I cut all the coupons from newspapers and magazines, and demanded that my parents use them. All the savings from the coupons went to me, and from that revenue stream I payed my parents compound interest.

I also had a store where every product cost $1. We would go to the supermarket, and buy all kinds of household stuff that then I resold to my parents for real cash. I kept very good records for my bank and for my store. It felt very important to me that every transaction be recorded. I always gave to the customers carbon copies, so they had a record too.

Maybe I should start a business instead of doing this computer nonsense.

Unfortunately my grandmother thought I had autism rather than exceptional intelligence, and dragged me from psychologist to psychologist, who gave me all kinds of tests. They started with IQ tests (always scored over 160), but once they found I was gifted, they put me do all other kind of tests relevant to their current research. My grandmother was not happy they didn't really treat me, so she sent me to various psychiatrists instead.

My family pretended we were really, really poor, even though we were not, and didn't buy me the books and computers I needed. They sent me to a school full of stupid, violent, and quite literally criminal children.

By age 8 or 9 I have mastered feynman lectures of physics and I was studying particle physics. But I was slowed down by the lack of books and learning material.

I hated school. What a waste of my life. I stumble upon all these child prodigies who finished college at 12 while I had to endure that stupid school and lacked the most basic education appropiate for myself.

Remembering all this made me feel depressed, so I will stop now. There was a point I was trying to make (how I learn everything by myself, inductive and top-down, and how it's hard to learn bottom-up), but it's too difficult to write all this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Kearney