Learner Reviews & Feedback for Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics by Universiteit Leiden

The Course has been extremely helpful for my introduction to linguistics. As an ameture, I was reluctant if i'll be able to understand the course, but Prof and his students Marten and Inge made everything so easy and fun to learn. I have gained a lot of knowledge and it has been an amazing experience!

Highly recommended! This was my first Coursera course and I will never forget it. I took it before taking Linguistics at UMass. It helped me immensely and really got me interested in the subject. Now I am taking a TESOL certification course. To say this course opened doors for me is an understatement.

Loved it. The course helped me understand what the science of languages is about a bit deeper. Which has helped me a lot to gain more knowledge at my own University. Thank you for the most interesting representation of such a difficult material. And special thanks for the interview with Noam Chomsky!

This course covers a lot of topics in Linguistics. The level of detail is just enough such that it remains continuously challenging and interesting, but not so deep that one can get lost in the details. I highly recommend taking this course if you're looking for a broad introduction to the subject.

The lectures are extremely easy to follow even for somebody who has never heard of linguistics before. The required readings and suggested bibliography were extremely interesting and will give me something to work on even now that I have completed the course. Thanks for creating this great course!

Really interesting material! Sometimes i found the quiz questions about the language informants really difficult to answer, likely because I didn't speak any of those languages. But the professor and his assistants were really great-- knowledgeable and easy to listen to. I really enjoyed this!

I like this course very much. This course is very interesting. The examples given are also very detailed. In the examples, the speakers are native speakers, which makes me feel very good. The content of the lecture is very substantial, the course schedule is very compact but very interesting.

I though that the lay out of the course was engaging and interesting. Though, it wasn't easy at the same time and really challenged me to think in a completely different manner to the way that I usually do. Thank you very much for the assistance I needed to find something I want to pursue.

SPLENDID JOB! Great course, gives the sound knowledge about Introduction to Linguistics and about many different languages in the world! Really enjoyed every bit of it and gained so much knowledge out of it! The way of teaching is very easygoing and fun, Kudos to the Prof and team!

Good organization; Detailed analysis; Well-designed assignments and reasonable methodology for teaching, which is easy to follow, made This course an excellent one for beginners in linguistics. Thanks to Professor and All the volunteers' help offered in This course. Great Thanks!

This Course is a real Miracle. The way is conducted, the material that is assigned could not be better. The inclusion of Native Speakers of different languages, as well as the participation of the Students : Inge and Marten made me feel as one more of them. Thank You very Much

I really appreciated this course! All the lectures are well presented, and it always makes the students think and argue. And also it provides a great insight about linguistic for the ones who come from other scientific areas, such as Computer Science. I certainly recommend it.

This is a high quality course, giving you an overall of linguistics. The material is very good and the professor and the assistants are engaging. There is contribution from speakers of diverse languages and dialects and we can put to use the knowledge acquired in the course.

The idea of having language informants is brilliant! Was cool to analyze languages, although for example phonology research where we had go figure our about the "gaps" in the table, I did not understand at all how to do it. The rest was clear and understandable. Great job!

Very interesting introduction to the subject! Good variation of formats with lectures, discussions, interviews, lab visit. All who participated in the making of this course show their enthusiasm for their work which is very motivating. The course fulfilled my expectations.

This a real professional course, including at the academic level. It demands a lot of readings but the Instructor's explanations are really clear and easy to understand. There's a lot of linguistic analysis and hands on real practice that you cannot find in other courses.

I am almost towards the end of this course and honestly, it has been one of the best experience so far. Worth a 6 star!

The professor - sir, you are incredible! Thank you for this wonderful introduction to Linguistics.

I highly recommend this course. It is worth your time.

I really enjoyed the course considering that it is a free course. Generally, I was pleased with the content and interviews, also additional reading materials are really interesting. Thank you for your hard work. Looking forward to a more advanced course on linguistics.

Excellent introduction into linguistics. Touches upon the basics of the most common approaches to linguistics, clear videos, good informants where you're challenged to apply your skill. It was my first course so I can't compare but I suspect the bar has been set high.

Excellent and most enjoyable course!

The videos of the professor and his students are clear and fluent and even the quiz are not too hard.

And the best part are the informants in various languages one does not encounter every day.

The course is mostly recommended to all.

Great cours! Very good way for introducing to the field of linguistic and to this real miracles of human languages. Language is a tool that we are using every day and this course give an opportunity to observe and to think about it and knowing ourselves a bit more.

Professor Marc van Oostendorp is a wonderful teacher. You can see he loves his subject and finds joy in it, and he enjoys transmitting his knowledge to others. It was a good rhythm to have the in and out flow of Martin and Inge as well. I really enjoyed this course.

Despite some technical difficulties with the forum and the quiz, the actual course was so AMAZINGLY interesting that it has motivated me to take up linguistics in the future. I didn't lose interest even once for the entirety of the six weeks I spent on this course!

Very good course; would recommend to anyone who is interested in learning a little about linguistics. It is the perfect level for an introductory course, not too difficult, but very informative and covered many topics and featured many interesting guest speakers.

Extremely pleasant experience gotten in the course, I think it's worth trying for anyone who has the slightest related or direct interest in Linguistics. This reveals some facts of common concerns in my opinion. Reasonable setting of sections as a guiding course.