<p>What's it like? How is the material -- is it more abstract, deductive, and "meta" or more straightforward and concrete?</p>
<p>I'm thinking of taking this class next semester but unsure. I think it would help immensely with my new major, since I want to study Latin and linguistics might help.</p>
<p>The class I'm considering isn't a linguistics class for any language in particular -- it's more like an intro. to linguistics.</p>
<p>My sister is taking an intro to linguistics class, and it seems to be straight-forward and concrete.</p>
<p>It’s pretty concrete and really straightforward…but this is coming from someone who’s majoring in linguistics. </p>
<p>Try to go over the IPA a little bit before taking it; that’s usually where students in the intro class start having trouble, based on the people I’ve tutored. You shouldn’t have to know much more than the characters relevant for English for an intro class, but that will likely depend on your professor.</p>
<p>I concur with the going over the IPA suggestion. Also try to familiarize yourself with the different areas of articulation in your mouth that’s used to produced certain sounds. For example, **, [p], and [m] are bilabial sounds and [f] and [v] are labiodental sounds. It helps because then you wouldn’t have to think much about what produces what sounds. I’ve just started taking a linguistics class and I’ve been absentmindedly feeling around the inside of my mouth with my tongue and quizzing myself on the different areas of articulation since I’ve never learned about them before.</p>
<p>I’m taking a bit of a specified linguistics course, and I agree that it’s pretty straight forward. My professor lectures and I just write stuff down. I have my final exam for it tomorrow, and I know it’s going to be about all the stuff he talked about. </p>
<p>Depending on the branch of linguistics, you can have a lot of detailed information that you need to know. We’re dealing primarily with speech production and aphasia, and we need to know all the different symptoms and its impacts on speech. </p>
<p>It can be tedious, but it’s not impossible. I’ll probably end up with a 3.7 (92 or 93%) because I messed up on some labs, but the content wasn’t too hard.</p>