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

Well organised, insightful and digestible introductory course.

Great course with lots of interesting content for anyone interested in linguistics. My only complaint is that some of the questions (especially the ones in the videos) are a bit poorly worded and can be confusing. Overall though, well worth the time spent, and a big thanks to Dr. Oostendorp, Marten, Inge, the language informants and everyone at Universiteit Leiden & Meertens instituut that made this possible.

I absolutely loved this course. I learned so much from the lecturer and the students.

A great and complete introduction to the exciting world of linguistics, with emphasis on language diversity and endangered languages. Highly recommended.

Very interesting, well structured and orginized course.

This course indeed has helped to repackage my profile.

Very interesting and passionating course even for people who are new to linguistic.

It is a great course including details and all aspects of linguistics. It satisfies my curiosity!

The course is interesting and offers a theoretical basis together with real language examples, that is a good combination when trying to put some of the theory in practice. The interviews with researchers also offer different perspective into interesting topics. What I consider not quite well accomplished are the tests: some offer incorrect answers to questions that already have been pointed out, as mentioned by the staff, in previous editions. Not having them corrected rests credibility to the entire course material. The final test includes some questions that although having relationship with a particular module, are hardly something relevant to take away from this course (e.g. in what sentence did a language informant repeat a nasal sound as a result of a speech error). If we consider tests as a learning tool, as they should be, the way they are designed should be more careful and meaningful to the learner. Despite the parts that to me need improvement, I want to thank to everybody involved in preparing and offering this MOOC, as I know from personal experience how challenging this can be.

This was a very interesting course and introduced me to a lot of interesting concepts and expanded my understanding of the concept of linguistics. I felt some areas could have been explored a bit deeper but overall I enjoyed the course very much.

Material is excellent and very interesting. Test questions can be confusing and poorly phrased.

This course does a decent job of covering the main pillars of linguistics and puts the theories into practice by giving us a chance to apply our learnings of each module to real-life languages, and it even includes native speakers of those languages.If you're new to linguistics or want to brush up on your previous learnings, this course is definitely a great supplementary resource.

The course was very interesting and well laid out. The only problems I faced were technical issues during quizzes and forum posts, but the course content itself is excellent and a good starting point for exploring linguistics and human languages.

This was an interesting but challenging course. What I would recommend as an improvements is that the quizzes included comments for wrong answers and suggestions what material to re-read or listen.

Interesting content, but still a bit buggy...

VERY good content and classes! Some questions in the quizzes are confusing, and there was the trouble with the required reading for Week 3. The first Honors assignment is confusing - specially its very last input question.

Thank you for your great effort making this course possible for people from all over the world.

101 linguistics

great course!

A comprehensive introductory course to the study of linguistics. Would be even better if it covers more applied linguistics topics.

some problems in quiz part are confusing... but nice course in general

Sometimes it was hard to understand the concept the professor was trying to make, because some grammatical forms were wrong and therefore the whole concept misleading. Otherwise very interesting course and thank you!

The interview with Chomsky a real treat.

Very nice work on the various fields of Linguistics, high level interviews, but rather laborious and time consuming quizzes.

It's fantastic to have a brief look into the intriguing Linguistics. There's so much to learn. But some of the readings and test might be too difficult and improper for a beginner.