| Information | Review |
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Valentine Hacquard
LING410 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/26/2021 |
Learned a good amount about semantics. The workload was pretty light, and the material was presented well, with helpful walkthroughs as we built up knowledge. Dr. Hacquard and the TA felt easily accessible and very willing to help with any problems students had. This was an intro class but I wish we could have dug a bit deeper and gone a bit further with the material. The last unit was the best part of the class, since we got to look at semantic problems in the real world. Overall, her lecturing was easy to understand and sparked some very interesting discussions. I'd recommend Dr. Hacquard! |
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Valentine Hacquard
HONR218L Expecting an A OtG 03/19/2012 |
Hacquard gave a capable and comprehensive survey of the field, with thorough notes. However, her lectures were often slow and a bit monotonous, and the TA was somewhat incomprehensible. Don't be fooled: HONR218L is an introduction to linguistics. If that's what you're looking for, it should be a fine class; otherwise, you're probably signing up for the wrong one. |
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Valentine Hacquard
HONR218L Expecting an A Sam Blitzstein 04/18/2010 |
I wasn't going to review this until I saw the other two biased reviews, and wanted to make sure the alternate viewpoint could be heard. Coming from someone who knew nothing about linguistics prior to taking this class, after taking it I've now actually declared linguistics as a double major. Sometimes you don't know you like something until you try it, and for me, that's how it was with linguistics. How do you know if you'd like linguistics, though? As the other reviewers said, if you think this class is going to be a psycholinguistics/cognitive linguistics course, you'll probably be disappointed in 3/4 of the class material. The problem is that as interesting as psycholinguistics is, without a background in general linguistics study you'll be completely lost and unable to really learn much. We do spend a good amount of time learning the things others have mentioned (and Dr. Hacquard herself does research here into those kinds of things), but if you're hard-set on only learning those things and not any intro linguistics, you'd probably be better off looking for something else. So if you are interested in those sorts of things, and come in with an open mind, you can really get a lot out of this class. You'll learn more than you will in the general intro linguistics class, in an honors-type classroom setting, and once you have some background, you'll get into those more advanced linguistics topics too. I found the grading very fair, the exams not easy but again, fairly curved, and lectures compelling - she gives out lecture slides that will ensure you don't have to worry the whole time about taking notes, but you definitely still need to listen because the slides are really just overviews of the lectures themselves. Plus, an added bonus- if you do find yourself interested in linguistics enough to pursue a major or minor, this class counts as the first class necessary for either. |
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Valentine Hacquard
HONR218L Expecting an A Anonymous 05/13/2009 |
This class was not enjoyable at all. I was interested in how children acquire language and what I basically got was an intro linguistics class, which was not what I bargained for. The lectures were her reading aloud from a packet given to us; as if we couldn't read it ourselves. The information was confusing and very difficult to piece together. The exams were VERY hard, but they are curved, along with the other class grades. Overall, an extremely boring class, unless you're actually into linguistics. |
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Valentine Hacquard
HONR218L Anonymous 04/22/2009 |
I did not enjoy this class. I expected it to be much more about relating language to the mind...the psychology behind acquiring it, differences between species, etc. However, it mostly focused on the linguistic aspect, which did not interest me. The lectures were pretty boring and I did not like her teaching style at all. |