This course is an introduction to linguistics, and it is not necessarily for LING majors, so content-wise it is quite light. To the professor’s own admission, it is very easy to get a B to A- in the course but very hard to get much higher than that. As such, it is a good grade booster only if your other courses are very hard. It is, however, a very interesting course and I recommend it for anyone with space for an elective.

This course covers basic linguistic concepts such as phonetics, phonotactics, and categorization of languages. We also briefly covered various languages and language families around the world, emphasizing English and Halkomelem with all their varieties. This course teaches the IPA, including consonants, vowels, and features from other languages. This course is test-based and questions are mostly MCQ and FRQ, with no major essays or projects, making the assessment practices closer to those of STEM courses than arts. The weekly quizzes and HWs are easy, and so are the MCQs on the exams, but the last few FRQs on the exams are designed so hardly anyone will get full credit on them. The professor admits this and said at the beginning of the course that there is no guarantee of an A, no matter ...read more

Strang Burton is an excellent and lighthearted professor with very entertaining lectures. He does grade participation but his lectures are interesting enough you would not want to miss them. He also welcomes you to ask him questions at the end of class.