If you want to make progress in a linguistics class, it is not enough to read the book. At some point you have to get feedback on a particular analysis. It is easy to sound right while still missing something…
Linguistics can feel really great at first. You learn a few rules about sounds, you learn a bit about how prefixes and suffixes work, and suddenly parsing a sentence doesn’t feel quite so daunting. But then you hit a point…
It isn’t about reading more pages, or learning more words. It’s about returning to the same kind of evidence frequently enough that patterns begin to emerge on their own. The problem for most students is that every topic is daunting…
One of the challenges of getting into linguistics is that there is so much to learn about. One page has sound changes, another about sentence organization, and another about meaning that is almost immediately too abstract. The first thing to…