Instructor

Prof. Vaijayanthi Sarma

Semester

Autumn ‘20

Course Difficulty

It is a moderate course as far as one is regular in lectures. Otherwise, it can be a difficult since the instructor makes everyone think based on the logic and information covered in the class.

Time Commitment Required

As far as one pays attention to the lectures, exams and assignments can be done with little effort. 1 to 2 hours per week should be sufficient apart from the lectures. It need not be a hectic course (of course depends on the person) but the instructor keeps you engaged throughout the semester - both inside and outside the lectures.

Grading Policy and Statistics

Grading is relatively moderate (7/20 were given >= AB) but class was small when I attended so cannot comment strongly on this.

Attendance Policy

The instructor generally wants students to attend lectures. They assigned some weight (5 %) for class participation, i.e. how involved one is in class discussions. Moreover, they can impose min 80% attendance requirement in an offline semester. However, this should be confirmed by attending few initial lectures since I do not have offline experience of this course.

Pre-requisites

No prerequisites required.

Evaluation Scheme

Almost 35% weightage is given to assignments and weekly quizzes. There can be a viva based on the assignments constituting 10%. Rest are endsem and midsem but the distribution is flexible. Midsems and endsems are moderate but require a good understanding of class materials.

Topics Covered in the Course

The course is fundamentally an analytical study of human languages. It starts with a brief history of languages, their evolution in time and their geographical variations. Further, it discussed how children and adults acquire different languages. Then it moves to its scientific part, covering different various speech sounds generated by vocal chords, how they form various patterns giving rise to alphabets, how they lead to formation of words and meaningful sentences that help us to communicate. The course gives a universal perspective about human languages, i.e., not limiting to one particular language.

Teaching Style

The instructor delivers lectures using slides and often uses videos for various concepts. The teaching is and she is considerate about students’ understanding. She is friendly and encourages students to have discussions and keeps putting interesting questions in front of them. However, sometimes lectures are fast, but one can always ask her to repeat the concepts.

Tutorials/Assignments/Projects

No tutorials and no projects. The four assignments are interesting, where each student works on a language chosen by them. They involve answering some general questions, which again can be factual or can involve some analysis for the chosen language. One will have to do an external research about their language.

Feedback on Exams

The weekly quizzes are doable if one has paid attention to previous weeks’ lectures. They are both factual and involve some analysis, depending on the content of the course. Same goes for the exams. They are not lengthy but involve thinking. Answering them would require one to remember the concepts, and build their thinking on them. Without lectures, it can be difficult to attempt these.

Motivation for taking this course

Talking about me, I was interested in exploring something different from core engineering and I had a (very) little inclination for understanding human communications.

Course Highlights

Once or twice, the instructor played games with the students. Indeed a friendly person!

How strongly would I recommend this course?

I encourage one to take this course if they want to learn something new. It is totally fine if you do not have any background but taking it without knowing it might be a bad idea. Attend a few initial lectures and then decide!

When to take this course?

I took this course in Autumn 2020. It did not run in 2021, so going by the pattern it runs in alternate years. Otherwise, one can take it whenever they want and have time to explore something new.

Review By: Dhananjay Tiwari