Very hard class almost can never understand what he is teaching have to rely on outside sources which almost never exist hard to find concepts he's teaching on YouTube

phyiscs

he. cant teach for shit

don't take him

Lots of material in this course, very boring lectures, professors rarely get into more detail than what was on the slides. I get that this class is supposed to be difficult but I feel as if there is a LOT of room for improvement and there is definitely more things the professors can do to make class more interesting. It's frustrating that they almost never extrapolate on the material and when they do it is typically some tangent that isn't really super helpful.

I've learned a lot but I have also put in so so so many hours into this class and honestly I learned more from reading the book and the slides on my own than I did in the actual class itself. You kind of just get what you put in which I suppose is just like every other class.

Very nice people, they have the medical background and qualifications you'd expect of teachers for this class, but like I said earlier, they are just not very good at actually teaching the topics. You'd be better off going for the iclicker points and while they're busy reading directly off the slides in a monotone voice, make quizlets, flashcards, or however you study best and go over those for an hour or two a week.

Quizlet and notebook LM will be your best friends, I have made probably 50 for this class and if I do well on my final tomorrow (which I expect to do), I will have received an A. You really just need to take that first test, understand what the professor's exam questions are like (they aren't super tricky), and build study sets based off of those. Notebook LM is super useful as well, I would copy and paste the book chapters into a document, make a pdf, and make Notebook LM give me an audio overview of every chapter. If you don't have time for every chapter to get it's own review, use the in class notes as the content for LM to base your overview on.

I'd recommend this class to any Japanese learner, even if you're not super interested in linguistics. You'll learn a lot about the language that isn't covered in the Japanese language course progression.

Though I'm not a linguistics major, a lot of the content was very useful to me as a Japanese learner. Many subjects like pitch accent, compounding, mimetics, etc. were covered which I think made my studying of Japanese a lot more well-rounded.

Iwamoto-sensei is very kind and understanding if you have any concerns during the class. He posts the exact quiz questions before every class so you can prepare adequately for each one. He's very passionate about linguistics and genuinely cares what you have to say during discussion.

Heavily recommend taking an Intro to Linguistics course before taking this, made it very easy for me to understand linguistic concepts in a language other than English.