There were a lot fo sloppy mistakes in the videos, I looked up a lot fo the stuff up outside of the course (which I had to because it was explained to me on the course like i was a 5 year old) then when i tried to give genuinely thought out answers from my outside readings the course said it was wrong, i don't know who to believe but i have to beieve it is the course because there have been a number of times when a concept hasn't been explained in depth enough and the quiz has not reflected the quizzes. also a lot of the time the outside reading does not reflect the lectures, i did like the informants but this wasn't recapped and none of my errors were corrected before i had to go in to the quiz. You could add more videos after the informants to explain what we should have been looking for. Sometimes the task during this wasn' made explicitly clear. I did like the phonology part, that was fairly traightforward and well explained.

The course and videos are wonderful the speakers are engaging and the content fascinating. As a more casual student I am finding the quizzes far too difficult. I am a very smart person and I am struggling with understanding the phonetic alphabet and other very technical aspects of this course. I will be dropping the course because while I wanted to learn the concepts I do not have the time or patience to get that granular for a course of this type.

Interesting content, but issues with broken links needed to complete quizzes while they were due. Needs better explanation of how to use other resources. Many of the quiz questions are arbitrary, rather than really testing knowledge gained in the class. The lectures are still useful, and would recommend doing this as a free course, but see no use in paying for a certificate on completion of the course.

Instructions were confusing or absent in parts of the course. See forum. I also was left with no practical application of what I learned. I enjoyed the studies which showed language changing within cultural divisions

Very slow moving. Feels like you have to sit through a lot for very obvious information. I would recommend http://ielanguages.com/linguistics/ for a more detailed and more concise introduction.

no question that prof is very educated and knowledgeable but course was not quite what i expected.

I find the content not well structure

the quizzes can be trivial and misleading.

Interesting but way too difficult to pass the weekly exams.

I'm a science guy with no background about Linguistics and had expected this course to give me deeper understanding of human language from a point of view that is new to me, but what I found is Linguistic is nothing, no offense, as long as this course tells me. Most of the statements and the questions by the professor was not well-defined and opinionated. At lease I wanted many examples or facts in some organized way when we focus on a specific topic, but this course doesn't contain that feature. I think I am just not the target of this course, but I leave this review to save others like me.

I made it though one module. It periodically asked questions that were misleading due to linguistic imprecision. That seems ridiculous for a class about linguistics. However, while concerning, I didn't care so much. Go ahead and tell me my answer is wrong. No big deal. But the final nail in the coffin was that the links to the *required* reading didn't bring up the articles in question. It brought up website homepages, and searching those sites for the articles in question yielded no results. If it's required but doesn't exist, I *cannot* take the course.

This course seems to be poorly organized and poorly presented. When I read the text, the professor does not use complete sentences, asks intermediate questions before the relevant information is given and then assumes that the International Phonetic Alpabet is known to participants because no explanation of it is given. I studied Comparative Linguistics 30 years ago so the subject is not unknown to me but this presentation is horrible.

The one-star rating is because the required readings are veryinteresting.

Ethnologue under the free access does not provide the info the course requires, nor do any of the required reading links work. So So disappointed. Also Ethnologue does NOT offer an option for the free two months as the course suggests. I am so disappointed in Leiden, I will never take another leiden course. Not the first time, is the last time...

I couldn't complete the course because not all of their required readings were available to the public. When I tried to contact a moderator for help, no one ever responded.

It starts off as an ad for the university. I'd prefer to focus on the content, which should be all linguistics, not uni stats and whatnot.

Course was pretty interesting until I needed to take a test on the first week. This test is incorrect and it destroyed my motivation.

To difficult to enjoy, unfortunately.

extreamly hard! like a nightmare!