Language is compositional. It is a set of rules that work for units and sub-units that emerge into a form of communication, and since we all speak at least one language I believe it is to some degree intuitional how to reverse engineer it. Linguistics is fun!
Also: to solve a lot of interesting linguistics olympiad problems you don't have to have any field-specific knowledge at all, and you can solve most of them using just common sense — which is ~rare for international competitions.
On this page there are gamified problems from the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL), International Linguistics Challenge (ILC), North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition (NACLO), and the Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO). Each card has a scratchpad, click-to-pin on every word, and a stopwatch against an olympiad-pace target. The IOL cards run 2003 – 2023 (no 2020 — cancelled); for a year-by-year overview see the IOL browser.
Source: PuzzLing Machines (UKP Lab, TU Darmstadt, 2020), CC BY 1.0. Original puzzles by IOL · NACLO · UKLO · OzCLO · Russian / Estonian / All-Ireland olympiads · University of Oregon. Only the dev split (10 puzzles) ships with public answers. The remaining 86 in the corpus are held out as the benchmark's blind set.