This class was great in my opinion. At first, I was pretty stressed out by the many quizzes, since some quizzes felt impossible to get any points on, especially due to the time limits on them. However, Prof Bell changed the quizzes to not have any time limit, which helped a lot. She was in general very accommodating and receptive to feedback about the course structure.

Lectures were quite useful, but I didn't find the textbook to be all that useful. There is definitely a lot to learn in the class and it was sometimes hard to keep up with all the stuff we had to learn, but the quizzes definitely helped reinforce material and give hands-on practice with transcriptions, vowel/consonant recognition, etc.

The whole class was graded on a "skills-mastery" system. Essentially, each question you get right on a quiz gives you a skill-mastery point for the category of the quiz. Once you reach a specific threshold for that category, you're good to go for the rest of the quarter. Any points you don't get for the quiz do _not_ count against you, you can essentially only gain points as the quarter goes on. This personally alleviated a lot of my stress for grades, since I could track my progress and know that I wouldn't get screwed over by a bad quiz/assignment.

Aside from weekly batches of quizzes, there were 2 homework assignments that were straightforward and generously graded. There was also a take-home final over CCLE that was similarly generously graded.

Overall, this was a great class! Professor Bell and all the TAs were super helpful, passionate, and engaging. There were also a number of guest lectures that were super cool. I would definitely recommend this class!

Lectures were very straightforward, Final was similar to the weekly quizzes

Dr. Bell is the best professor I’ve ever had. Highly recommend this class!

I absolutely loved this class. My experience was nothing but positive and I am really glad that I get to take another class (ling 119A) with Professor Bell. I learned a lot, and as someone who enjoys learning new languages, this class has helped me greatly. It completely changed the way I hear things; I could never go back. I see phonetics everywhere now!

The lectures were very engaging and I liked the in-class activities and practice. At the end of the quarter, we got some guest lecturers, which were a great treat.

Rather than a traditional grading system, this class used a skills mastery system. There is a list of skills you need to learn, each with a certain number of points, and you get many opportunities to demonstrate them, mostly in the form of weekly online open-book quizzes. Your skills mastery grade can only go up, not down, and once you've earned all the points needed for a skill, you don't need to earn any more for that skill (but if you choose to for practice, you won't get deducted for wrong answers). It was really satisfying for me to see my skills mastery increase over the course of the quarter!

There were three homeworks. Although I found HW 2 and 3 pretty challenging, they were graded on completion.

It was also nice how we did not have a midterm exam. The final exam was pretty tough (the average was 73), but it was worth only 15% of the grade, so it wasn't a problem at all.

Overall, I really enjoyed the course and I'd highly recommend it!