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

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.

A great course, it contains very broad discussion of the problems of linguistics.

Quite demanding quizes force students to watch videos carefully and to read the required reading. This leads to better understanding of the matter.

The videos in the course are great too, the explanation of prof. Oostendorp is very lively and entertaining. The interviews with specialists are unique.

really good and interesting, the quizzes (especailly the final one) were a bit irritating when you had to keep flicking back to previous videos on the same page (the language informants); I felt that the final quiz should have been exclusively what has been lerned rather than going back to langauge informant videos. But otherwise, a fantastic free resource.

There's just one problem: the exams. The questions and logic behind the answers are not clear enough. It's an excellent course and certainly, it would be relevant to my career.

It is a nice course, very well organized for those you are eager to learn about the theoritical aspects of linguistics, such as semantics, morphology. Every video has several quizes, just like every module. I would surely recommend it to anyone.

A nice refresher for people who already have a linguistic background, and a nice introduction for beginners also. My problem was all the weird questions about the informants. Some of the questions are really hard to understand which makes them impossible to answer. I'm glad I took the course though!

Great introductory course. Helped me a lot to understand what linguists do even if I didn't quite get all the key ideas which weren't all explained in depth enough. The examples from languages are helpful but require quite a good ear so I guess it takes some gift for languages.