101 linguistics

great course!

Too difficult for an introductory course. Ambiguous information. Time estimates are way off. Not what I expected. Rather provincial in its approach. Guess I'm just not cut out to be a linguist. Answers to the tests are not available or derivable from the lectures and required readings. I've read a lot of articles and books, particularly about neurolinguistics and the intersection between linguistics and genomics and the information in the course does not really assist with understanding what I've been reading, though I can sort of see how the authors might have made use of some of the things presented here. The interview with Chomsky was particularly useless.

The content was very interesting and offered in coherent ways. The quizzes, however, were more challenging than they needed to be. A lot of the questions were asked in unusual and unclear ways which made answering it very difficult because I wasn't always sure what exactly they were asking. I also found it difficult to know what exactly the answers meant as they often didn't correspond exactly to the way things were said in the lectures and readings, so even if you followed the content closely the answers didn't always make sense.

The ethnologue is a mess, and I don't think a linguistics course should depend on a website to pass not only some questions, but almost half of a module, because you can understand perfectly what people is saying about their languages and you can formulate accurate questions that can be answered with the information given, and not researching in a web that has different content than the course provides, or changes the numbers, or absolutely ignore some important facts of languages searched.

It is a decent course that teaches the very basics of linguistics. It covers the topics of a Linguistics 101 course but no topic is explored in depth. It seems that some of the topics mentioned are barely even touched (e.g., Week 5 - Language in the Brain). Professor Oostendorp is a good lecturer but the lectures are not presented for easy notetaking. You should be prepared to make your own notes from the video lectures given few summaries/bulleted lists/etc.

I watched all the videos, but did not do the coursework.

I was a total beginner on the subject. The videos were very well made, and quite nice to watch.

However, I feel like the material was a bit too easy for my taste. I would have enjoyed a course that delved into "harder things".

For someone who doesn't like as much "hard challenges" as I do, I do think that this course is a nice introduction to the subject.

I was expecting that the course would cover IPA in-depth. It's pretty unconscionable that an intro linguistics course would not pay deep attention to this topic.

It is a good course for an introducion to Linguistics. However, it is a ittle technical

I had a great and much needed introduction.

Tiffany B.

There were a lot fo sloppy mistakes in the videos, I looked up a lot fo the stuff up outside of the course (which I had to because it was explained to me on the course like i was a 5 year old) then when i tried to give genuinely thought out answers from my outside readings the course said it was wrong, i don't know who to believe but i have to beieve it is the course because there have been a number of times when a concept hasn't been explained in depth enough and the quiz has not reflected the quizzes. also a lot of the time the outside reading does not reflect the lectures, i did like the informants but this wasn't recapped and none of my errors were corrected before i had to go in to the quiz. You could add more videos after the informants to explain what we should have been looking for. Sometimes the task during this wasn' made explicitly clear. I did like the phonology part, that was fairly traightforward and well explained.

The course and videos are wonderful the speakers are engaging and the content fascinating. As a more casual student I am finding the quizzes far too difficult. I am a very smart person and I am struggling with understanding the phonetic alphabet and other very technical aspects of this course. I will be dropping the course because while I wanted to learn the concepts I do not have the time or patience to get that granular for a course of this type.

Interesting content, but issues with broken links needed to complete quizzes while they were due. Needs better explanation of how to use other resources. Many of the quiz questions are arbitrary, rather than really testing knowledge gained in the class. The lectures are still useful, and would recommend doing this as a free course, but see no use in paying for a certificate on completion of the course.

Very slow moving. Feels like you have to sit through a lot for very obvious information. I would recommend http://ielanguages.com/linguistics/ for a more detailed and more concise introduction.

Interesting but way too difficult to pass the weekly exams.

I do not like this course. There are far too many prejudicial ideas - even in the first unit. A language does not have to be used by a single / unified group to define it as a language. Esperanto is a perfectly valid language, fully capable of expression, and does not belong to a single / unified group. There are no native speakers, either - which does not rob it of the fact that there are winners of the Nobel Prize for literature who write in it. The things you are saying about language are not merely willfully ignorant, they are highly offensive & prejudicial. I cannot conscience supporting a course like this.

To difficult to enjoy, unfortunately.