The course itself is fine. The quizzes, however, are so frustrating as to lower the enjoyment of the whole thing. Numerous answers are just factually wrong. You end up retaking the quiz time and again and then selecting random answers just to pass.

Professor Marc van Oostendorp has woven a lovely and living web of an introduction/refresher to Linguistics for anyone with the beginning of a serious interest. His enthusiasm and outright love of the discipline are infectious and are filtered by an evident and generous humanity. This works especially well in his choice of guest speakers who are without exception a joy to hear. He ties it all together at the end with William Labov's wonderful retrospective, showing the student that one doesn't have to be a follower of a particular school of thought to appreciate how its proponents generously pour their discipline, experience, skills, love and humanity into what they are doing. In so doing they, as well as the good Professor, share the essential lesson: approach language with all the scientific discipline you can muster but always keep in mind that it is something human, mysterious and very much alive, and always changing. Something that cannot be caged.

Why only two stars? One star off for each of the following:

First, it is too light and the required readings too short and too easy. Furthermore, there is an over focus on certain topics, especially politeness theory and speech errors, which doesn't really go anywhere. Other topics, such as approaches to syntactical analysis, cognitive linguistics, etc. could well be further explored.

Next, the structure of student participation should be enhanced to require much more lateral work (of better quality) among and between students currently taking the course. Much of the recent input was appallingly poor, leaving one with the impression that participants where just ticking boxes.

Finally, and most importantly, is the failure of the course on this commercial platform. The student receives many emails urging the purchase of a certificate or of other courses, but the course itself is not kept properly updated. It contains many errors that have not been corrected for quite some time. Most are not very important, but some, including a few patently incorrect quiz and exam answers (which have been cited and admitted in the Forum but not changed), are important. The student has, in effect, no way to check where s/he might have gone wrong. The student gets no up-to-date feedback. The course was free, a kind of teaser for the commercial product, but that gives Coursera all the more reason to keep it updated, to keep on improving it. One gets the impression, as things now stand, that Coursera cares about the money a little too much. That it has missed the balance between the search for profit and the search for meaning.

Coursera is letting this course, a lovely living thing, slowly die on the vine.

Jack Kennedy

The content of this course is great,

The reason I'm giving it this low ranking is because the course was built in a terribly poor way that will make you go loco.

a. The exams - I'm doing everything is possible during the course, I'm taking notes, reading all the required reading materials, etc. and still, in the exams I get questions that are not related at all to what I've learned, some of them were never in the course content, some of them are more matter of opinion, but you will still fail the exam if you get the wrong, this + the fact that the exams in this specific course require a very high score to pass + when you fail you cannot see where you were wrong = recipe for disaster. I'm just guessing time after time in order just to pass the exam, not useful at all for studying, and mostly annoying.

Now multiple this by 6 exams...

b. The Peer to Peer Assignments - they require a terrible high grade, nearly perfect, which basically means that if 1 peer gave you a low rank on 1 parameter, you fail it and need to start it over and wait again to all the peers to score it (which sometimes can take more than a week). This will make sure you will not finish this course fast, and you find yourself doing the same works again and again.

c. The reading materials - they are generally good, and I've read them all so far, BUT, there are too many of them. For each week (there are 6 weeks) you have enough "required content" for hours of reading, I've never seen that much required reading from external websites in other sources, another problem with this is that many of these reading sources won't let you read too much before they ask you to pay in order to continue reading, again, not the most useful thing for learning (instead I would expect this course to provide it's own reading sources, free to the students, and only relevant to the content of this course).

Bottom line - this course could have been a great course thanks to it's great content.

BUT "thanks" to the issues I raised above, this course will mostly make sure you will go bananas before you finish it.

I'm currently trying to finish it for 3 months without success.

I've taken a number of online courses on linguistics now, and this one was by and far the best. The material covered is indepth and engaging, and the professor's enthusiam makes the videos a delight.

At times I found the exam questions frustratingly ambigous, so a review of those would be in order so that future misconceptions can be avoided. The other thing that I found problematic is that the course offers a lot of trivial information, so at times I felt that I was wasting my time. In other words, it is maybe too much introductory in character, something which some persons would appreciate, but it was not for me. The best part of the course, in my opinion, are the interviews. I got the chance to hear a lot interesting stuff there. The language informants part is quite nicely done, too. It gives you the chance to sharpen your attention listening to language. The professor makes himself quite enjoyable till the end. It would be really nice if he considers next to start a more advanced MOOC on linguistics, one which will involve more readings and a chance to delve more deeply into the miracles he so cheerfully talked about.

I don't know what is the problem as I study the videos well and when it come to taking quiz i never pass so I watch the videos over and aver again but it always the same result

the part of other languages I'm not sure what is the point of it I mean does it help in English to know how to say for example hi in other languages plz if anyone passed the course . could u plz help me

The course was often confusing and the quizzes came down to a question of trial and error. I found this very frustrating. Although the topics were interesting, I didn't find them very well presented in spite of the enthusiasm of the lecturer. But there was a lot of ambiguity and bias and the inability to discuss except through the forums was off-putting.

It wouild be good to know why answers were wrong in the quizzes particulalry when you had put a lot of effort into studying them.

In the final exam, there are questions which are evidently wrong, both in their wording and in their marking and nothing has been done to remedy this in spite of the complaints in the discussion page.

This course is not so good. A lot of things are just come from the instructor's head without correcting reference from high quality literature. He can say whatever he think is right. But I would not say all animals do not have complex language systems, or we have one single origin of language. I would also suggest the instructor to interview more world-famous linguists, not just play simple ask and answer with his students.

The examples of different languages in the later weeks are interesting. But somehow I expect some better understanding of more aspects of languages. In general I would say it still has so much space for improvement. I would not recommend anyone to spend time on learning this course.

I do not like this course. There are far too many prejudicial ideas - even in the first unit. A language does not have to be used by a single / unified group to define it as a language. Esperanto is a perfectly valid language, fully capable of expression, and does not belong to a single / unified group. There are no native speakers, either - which does not rob it of the fact that there are winners of the Nobel Prize for literature who write in it. The things you are saying about language are not merely willfully ignorant, they are highly offensive & prejudicial. I cannot conscience supporting a course like this.

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.

The course was well-organised and very interesting. It covered the different aspects of linguistics wonderfully and prompted me to delve further into specific fields of linguistics such as phonetics.

Some of the material could be a bit more analytical, and there were a few problems with the quiz questions. Other than that, perfect! Great introduction to linguistics. Thank you for your hard work!

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.

Thanks to all the team! Great job!

extremely outdated. none of the resources are still up, and it DESPERATELY needs new material and more upkeep.

The tests are faulty. They need to be revised. This mistake makes it impossible for learners to progress in the course. You need to amend this.

I failed to see what the quizzes had to do with the lectures. There were errors, apparently, and I couldn't see the connection between the foreign language informants and what we were supposed to do in the quizzes. I was thankful that the discussions and peer assignments/ reviews were not required. If it were not for the mentors who helped with some of my trouble spots, I'm not sure what I would have. Even some of the questions on the final were barely discussed in the lesson. The professor Marc made it interesting and at times funny, and thus he did a great job, but because of the quizzes I nearly qu

the videos were interesting and informative however there was a vast difference between the level of the videos and the quizzes. it caused a lot of guessing and frustration because the questions and/or choices were unclear and the subject or topic being asked about were quite confusing.

I am not completely sure that I have fully understood all the terms and concepts discussed. very frustrating.

In short, DO NOT PURCHASE this course. I can only recommend the videos and sources it offers, everything else felt like a frustrating mess. I will go into much more detail below.

I thought that the information would be interesting and thought-provoking. I was only partially correct, however. The professor was engaging and enthusiastic, but almost no other parts of the course felt "finished".

First, in the lessons, there were plenty of mistakes on-screen including "Title" in the place of an actual title. There were also some weird spellings and confusing slides. During the videos, there would also be random pop-ups that were very poorly thought up.

The next problem is the discussion section. They are not for questions or discussion. I have no idea how to even check replies from other students.

Finally (even though there are more problems), the tests are terrible. The questions are incredibly confusing, ambiguous and the "correct" answer is arguably incorrect. The final test even had a question that required you to remember something that one of their videos missed.

Oh one more thing, many links they give are broken and the answers to tests are no longer accessible.

I do not recommend this course for anything more than basic information and entertaining interviews with experts.

Overall, I enjoyed doing this course and it was a fair overview of introductory linguistics. However, there are a couple of issues that made me give a very average rating.

The quizzes need to be revised. I also felt the frustration of redoing the quizzes and realising that several questions are very unclear, and a few don't have a correct answer. Sometimes the correct answer was vaguely mentioned in the videos. To fix this, the course-writers need to check that any answers are explicitly and clearly referred to in the course material first.

Discussions should be encouraged a lot more than once or twice a week. Some videos could lead to some very interesting discourse, but there isn't much prompting given to the students. Also, and this may be a fault in the website and not the course, I never got any notifications when someone replied to my comments (and I don't believe that other students were notified either, when I replied to their comments).

I hope this course gets a regular revision. The material is interesting, but the faults in the course are too obvious to ignore.

This course was very useful despite that I did not do it for credit. I have, overall been very content with the course. I would like to thank the professor, Mr. van Oostendorp and everyone else who helped for creating such an informative and interesting course. I would recommend this course to just about anyone.