Biggest advice is to go to lectures and take notes! Sportiche releases lecture outlines with most of the basic information, but it can be very hard to understand without his explanations. Much of the grade is also dependent on your TA, but if you keep in touch with them and go to office hours, you will have no problems.

Sportiche was moderately interesting in lecture. The homeworks were HARD if you attempt them on your own, but if you go to office hours with a TA, you'll basically be fed all the hw answers. Homework is a significant part of your grade so you basically want to get 100% in that category. There is a paper category, your homework category, and a final category. The paper shouldn't be too bad, and should hopefully boost your grade. The final was pretty difficult though; there's plenty of random linguistics trivia that you either know or you don't, that wasn't really covered in lecture. Final is MC. Surprisingly, the hardest topic in the course, Phonetics and Phonology, was barely covered on the final.

Taking Ling 1 with Professor Sportiche was quite an interesting experience. He is really passionate about what he teaches, and attending his lectures was mostly fun. Sometimes, it tended to get monotonous, but that was rarely anyways.

He was pretty strict on grading, and graded on a standard scale (no curve whatsoever). The grade distribution was as follows-
Weekly homework assignments: 45%
Term paper: 10%
Final: 45%

The weekly homework assignments given in the discussion sections were of great help to practice the content taught in that week. They also gave you a good idea how well you are doing and understanding the material as the class progressed.

I would definitely recommend you to get started on your term paper a bit early, frame an outline for the same and discuss it with your TA to ensure you're going on the right track. For this paper, you basically need to compare English and one another language that you speak on the basis of certain linguistic characteristics. I didn't find the paper particularly hard.

As for the readings, Professor Sportiche had the book A Language Instinct as required reading for this course. Keeping up with the readings a week ahead of their time is greatly helpful and important as some of the questions on the homework assignments and the final were directly from the book, and the text in the book was a good introduction to the material he was gonna cover in the class.

He also posted all his lecture notes online on CCLE, which included all the relevant and important information. The final exam, in my opinion was unexpectedly harder than what we had been doing in the homework assignments and what was expected, but in the end, it all worked out. In all, this was an interesting GE which did require consistency and hardwork but was also really informative. I would definitely recommend someone genuinely interested in Linguistics to take this class with Professor Sportiche.

Linguistics just isn't my thing, I found the class to be immensely boring and that's why didn't really give it my all when it came to studying. My TA was some dude named Nic...something, he made the discussions really boring, so if you take the class, take it with another TA. There's weekly homework assignments, a paper, and then a final.

Selling the textbook (has a self-made textbook cover, can take that off if preferred)
text: (213) 352-7569
or
email: hakter13@g.ucla.edu

good luck with the class

Grade is based off of weekly homework, final exam, and final paper (very structured style, graded easily)

Lecture is very tedious, he studies syntax so take it if you're interested in that but if you want to learn about how language is processed in the brain and about linguistic development in children and around the globe Sportiche is not the right professor for you. Nevertheless, it is a fair class and an A is manageable with low effort

This class was fine. Professor Sportiche told us that he you need to take notes in this class, and I think he's right. His lectures aren't incredibly interesting, but he's a fun personality. Homework is tedious but doable, and you can collaborate with other people. The "textbook" is just a normal book that's super easy to read. Personally, I don't think the final was that easy, as some people have said, but I got an A after looking through my notes once and doing the reading assignments as they were assigned. Overall, this is a great GE to take if you need to fulfill the life science requirement but hate science.

So Professor Sportiche is hilarious and really cool. The workload is light; there were only weekly discussion worksheets and a chapter or two of reading every week. However, if you are not genuinely interested in the study of language (linguistics), you will find this class boring, useless, and conceptually dry. The concepts get difficult around week 4, and from then on, you have to really pay attention to the lectures (which even when you do, it is still very confusing and the powerpoints are haphazard), really pay attention in discussion / section, and attend office hours.

There were no midterms, which is nice. The final was 90 multiple choice questions with a separate essay assignment that was straightforward and easy to write.

I guess it's a tradeoff of studying something that is super boring and having to suffer 10 weeks of being confused and bored for a class that does not require a lot of work.

Sportiche posts extremely detailed lecture notes on CCLE during the middle of each week. These lecture notes contain almost everything you need to know to complete the homework and score an A on his exams. Although he requires reading from the textbook, I stopped reading after week 2 and instead paid close attention to the lecture notes. Sometimes the homework asked about info that was exclusively found in the textbook, but Sportiche outlines the reading at the end of each week's lecture notes so that you can simply go back to the book and search for the relevant info rather than read entire chapters.
He assigns weekly homework packets that take about 1-2 hours to complete. There is one final paper that is relatively simple to write, worth 10% of your grade.
I recommend taking detailed notes from Sportiche's lecture notes so that you don't have to put too much effort into paying attention during lecture/reading the textbook, and also collaborating with others during TA office hours so that you can get full points on the assignments. The TAs I encountered were very helpful and gave detailed instructions on how to go about the homework.
Sportiche is a syntactician, so much of the curriculum will be geared towards that. He also likes to be somewhat tricky with some of his questions on the HW and on his exams, so be mindful of that! Otherwise I highly recommend this class with this professor. Sportiche is always well-prepared, well-organized, and very well-versed in the subject. Don't read - pay attention to the lecture notes and you should be good!

All the reviews are very representative of the class. Getting 100% in the HW category is very helpful considering it is 45% of total grade. However, while this makes the class seem easy the HW was extremely difficult for me to do on my own. I would go to my TA's office hours for clarification/help on concepts asked in the HW and often would often leave more confused. They would often take me hours to complete. I would highly suggest working with other classmates as they helped me get 100% in my HW category!! Towards the end of the quarter I started going to another TA's office hours and he was actually helpful! So if you are unlucky like me and get a bad TA I would highly recommend going to another TA's office hours. Also, professor Sportiche was super helpful in his office hours. I was usually the only student there and he actually tried to get to know me, asking where I was from, about my major, etc. Unlike, many of the professors here he actually cares about students even if he doesn't seem the friendliest in lecture.
Like many of my classmates, I was unsure what the course Linguistics 1 entailed or what even linguistics was. I was surprised to discover that the course that it is largely based on grammar rules. This is why I think the course concepts were especially challenging for me to understand. Coming into the class, I did not have a strong linguistic/grammar background. This course is very technical and also annoying because you are required to understand pointless topics that you will never use again unless you are a linguistics major.
Lecture: I would highly recommend attending every lecture! although he does post the lecture notes which is nice when studying for finals. during lecture though it was very hard for me to retain any information taught as the professor goes extremely fast and his slides include a ton of content. I would frantically try to type down all the notes which I do not recommend doing as he posts the lecture notes. He even says his lectures are just meant for listening. I would recommend writing down what he says in lecture and not word for word what is on the slide.
during the class, if you were to ask me to recommend this class I would say NOOO.
however, after taking the final I think it is a doable GE just not as easy compared to the other GE's I was taking at the time. This was my hardest class during my quarter.
While its GREAT there is no final, this made preparing for the final very stressful as I did not know what to expect or what it would be tested on. I did all the required reading however I am unsure if all the hours I devoted towards reading the book was beneficial considering there are no clicker quizzes. Although, there was specific questions from the book in the final. The majority of the final consisted exact questions from the HW and the concepts tested in the HW minus the extra credit. Also he does offer extra credit on the HW to help you get 100% of HW however you cannot get over 100% on the HW.
Therefore, I thought the final was doable and very fair. However, I did devote two weeks preparing for it. I mainly reviewed HW and lecture notes.
My final grade was an A. I got 100% for HW and A on the final paper (super easy don't even worry, I got -.5 on it) and I got an 86% on the final.
Overall I am super happy to be done with this class but I would suggest it to people or have a strong background or grasp on linguistics and grammar.
sorry so long hope this helps!

Selling required book "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker for $10
Text (714) 308-9279