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.

The course was revamped this year, so there were definitely a lot more chances to do well. It is interesting, but the workload can get crazy.

I gave up on doing the Edx half way through the semester since it was time consuming and I was learning nothing from it. There are deadlines for all the EDX readings, with a two week grace period but it's very easy to fall behind. Our TA's, both for the lectures and tutorials, were really helpful, so highly recommend asking them questions. For our midterms, we were given catalogs for the types of questions that would be tested. They also moved midterms testing online (CBTF), and gave us multiple attempts to do better. The final, however, was insanely difficult, even though they gave us a cheat sheet.

Prof Reinsberg is a good prof and clearly knows what he's doing. He tries to do a bunch of demos in class so you can visualize the concepts. He's also very approachable, so don't be afraid to ask him any questions.

Ask questions! The entire teaching team is really nice and will try to help you as much as possible.

The class was easy overall.

Even though you don't really need to go to class, I would definitely recommend it. We had 3 tests, all of which I found pretty straightforward since I had a pretty strong French base. The vocabulary we learnt was from the textbook. Good class to take if you really want to learn French. If you're taking it for a requirement, keep in mind that there are quite a few deadlines that you could miss if you have a heavy course load.

She was very approachable and always open to questions. Just make sure you stay on her 'good' side by participating in class.

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