>>10408166Not only it's true, it's also applicable to most of the skills like languages, music, painting, etc. Now, there might be some sort of "affinity" and some people may be able to catch up significantly faster, but for all practical purposes you can consider yourself as being capable of "doing math".
Source: am a mathematician who knows several languages, drawing, playing a musical instrument, and plenty of other stuff. It irritates me more than everything when people look at me and say "oh, you are talented". No you fucker, I spent literally years practicing. Am I gifted for understanding etale cohomologies? No, just in uni I spent all my free time reading books while you were playing MMOs or banging chicks.
There was a guy who was pretty bad at math at school and sucked at all the tests in uni. He was in a separate department (humanities) but we were good friends. So around the 2nd year when I got better at math myself I decided to teach him. It was so difficult and very demoralizing because I didn't want to let him down but also it hurt my ego. I made him actually do the exercises himself, and it was very clear why he sucked at math - he gave up very quickly at the simplest problems and he lost attention very quickly. I taught him how to learn rather than how to math, and he actually got straight 4s in stats and linear algebra (I guess it translates into B in murica).
Later, to graduate I had to teach for three semesters and it only further proved my view of "talent". Again, some sort of affinity or predisposition may exist, but it is more likely you suck at learning and lack fundamentals.
