In my experience you can find helpful things to do without having studied CS or compiler design.

For example you could try to write a parrot backend for kp6. It now emits perl5 and common lisp, so you have templates on how the emitted code looks like in two other languages, and how the runtime works etc. Actually such a backend would be a good idea for a Perl 6 Micro Grant.

My impression is that kp6 is a non-CS project where you can understand the architecture easily without deeper compiler knowledge.

And if you don't want to write compilers, you can still help with the test suite, among other things. See Getting Involved with Perl 6 for more ideas.