Learner Reviews & Feedback for Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics by Universiteit Leiden
About the Course
Top reviews
Extremely informational, well presented, with questions that stimulate reflection. The optional reading material is food for thought. I hope to see more courses from the same professor and University.
Excellent! Really enjoyed and learnt a lot. I did not expect such a great content and professionalism in a free course. I am definitely purchasing for the title.\n\nThanks to all the team! Great job!
476 - 500 of 528 Reviews for Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics
By Daniele C R
•Very nice work on the various fields of Linguistics, high level interviews, but rather laborious and time consuming quizzes.
By Liz J
•I enjoyed the course and learned a lot. I wish there had been more interaction in the discussions, though.
By Xiaoyun Y
•It is a great course including details and all aspects of linguistics. It satisfies my curiosity!
By Mustapha K
•Thank you for your great effort making this course possible for people from all over the world.
By Kathleen K
•Material is excellent and very interesting. Test questions can be confusing and poorly phrased.
By Genevieve L D K
•Very enjoyable however, I feel that Quiz Three needs to be looked over for software problems.
By Antonella C
•Very interesting and passionating course even for people who are new to linguistic.
By Tianyu Z
•It is a great introduction course, covering every aspect related to linguistics.
By Laureen E
•First course tried.. succeeded! Very informative and nice to work on! Thank you
By André L
•Interesting course, I've learned a lot of things about studying languages.
By Jia W
•some problems in quiz part are confusing... but nice course in general
By Gautam M
•An eye-opener and a game changer course to understand humanity.
By Nathalie v L
•great course. Great refresher 30 years after college.
By Mohammed A A A
•One of the most brilliant courses I have ever taken!
By Osnat B
•Wide-angle, general introductory course. Engaging.
By Ruben A M d C
•Interesting content, but still a bit buggy...
By Fernando C M
•Good course, nice teachers, good material
By Dorothy H
•The interview with Chomsky a real treat.
By Cecilia C
•Very interesting course! Thank you!
By Dennis M
•Great introduction to linguistics.
By Rizky A D
•101 linguistics
By Wang x
•great course!
By Li j x
•很好best
By Valdas M
•Interesting course. It's difficult to cover everything in such a short course. The last two weeks' classes have not much to do with "miracles" of languages. I would say these things are common to all languages. I would have preferred to concentrate more on firs 4 weeks topics. This all stuff with politeness does not fit much in the topic. It's more sociolinguistics, cultural studies etc. And there is not much to learn. There is no much valuable information to remember. I liked more the beginning about sounds, typology of languages etc. This all stuff with positive and negative face was a little strange. Specially, it was difficult to do the tests with these "faces". Listening exercises were quite OK, but for instance to decode Chinese without transcription was impossible task. All these exercises with language mistakes was also strange. If we all do pronunciation mistakes in all languages what’s the point to study these mistakes? What's the point to see what mistake is made in Basque, Gungbe or any other language? I saw this exercise as pure waste of my time. So, my general suggestion would be to concentrate on pure linguistic things (first 4 weeks) and do not go into field of sociology, neuro or psycholinguistics. BTW this couple of students is not balanced because the young man dominates all discussions. The girl should be more active or the man less active.
By Jacques C
•The course materials are incomplete or incorrect. In at least 3 of the weeks the course refers to information that is either not provided or is no longer available at the source. And there are at least 2 quiz questions that have incorrect answers. (And they acknowledge the questions are incorrect in the forums, but haven't bothered to fix them).
I would say that this course is also more difficult than it needs to be because some of the information required to properly understand the material and, thus, answer the quizzes is not covered in the course. Thus you basically have to troll wikipedia or google randomly to find this stuff out. It should just be provided as this is supposed to be a basic introductory course.
I also found all the peer interactions to be wanting. A lot of the learning is supposed to happen in the forums where you discuss things with your peers. Well almost no one replies to anyone else ... and when they do ... its generally not all that meaningful.
They obviously did a lot of work to get this course done and I appreciate that. But it should be a living thing. Mistakes should be corrected, a better way to have students interact with each other should be imagined.
I did get a good introduction to the concepts of linguistics even though the construction of the course is quite frustrating. So I gave it 3 stars.
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