I learned so much in this class! Very sad this course is coming to an end. Professor Mateu is super clear, helpful, and engaging in all of her lectures. She provides lots of supplemental material, so it's super easy and accessible to practice some of the harder concepts (not that there are too many challenging concepts). The homework is fair, a very clear reflection of the course material, and the questions appropriately prepare you for the midterm and final exams (both of which are online, timed, and very reasonable). As long as you show up to class, engage with the material, and apply yourself the slightest bit, I assure you you'll find yourself feeling interested by the coursework and lectures. Had Isabel as a TA- she is very lovely: willing to help out wherever she can, super caring.

Took this class as a GE and loved it! Even though it's not required, it's really helpful if you know Spanish or Portuguese since a lot of the examples are in Spanish/Portuguese. I wouldn't recommend taking the class if you don't have any background with either language, otherwise you might have a lot more difficulty learning the material, especially since you need to come up with examples on the hw in Spanish or Portuguese. We didn't need to write any papers, but there were weekly hw assignments that were graded on accuracy. Since the class was asynchronous, the lectures were all posted on CCLE. The lectures can be kind of lengthy though, and you had to watch them before Tuesday at 9am even if your discussion was on another day. For participation, there'd be a couple of questions embedded throughout the lectures that you had to answer and submit, but you as long as you try your best to answer most of them, it's okay if you leave some blank. The material for the most part was pretty straightforward, but I think the hardest concept in class was learning the IPA and phrase structure trees. Overall, I'd recommend taking this class!