OK, after a long hiatus, I'm back to continue my reflections on the courses I've taken at Yale.
This time I turn to my second major, linguistics. In total, I've taken 12 linguistics courses (unlike S&DS, I have a lot of other connections with the linguistics department besides courses, but here I just focus on academics). 2 (LING 490 Research Methods in Linguistics, LING 491 The Senior Essay) are senior essay classes and have no true substance (well they were helpful, but not intended as real classes). I'll only recount the other 10 courses here.
Linguistics is a fairly unstructured major and basically you can always assemble a convincing curriculum if you just take random LING courses. I went on a deep dive in both syntax/semantics and phonetics/phonology, and there are many other courses—which I primarily took for distributional requirements—that helped me see linguistics from other angles, bringing together all the disciplines in a practical scenario.
I took 3 classes related to syntax, semantics, and natural language structure: LING 253 Syntax I (semester 3), LING 254 Syntax II (semester 6), LING 263 Semantics I (semester 7).
LING 253 Syntax I: This is a required course of the major. As an ESL speaker I learned English "the right way", which is to structurally analyze every sentence I see: possessive, accusative, relative clause, gerund... So there's a fairly big chunk that I already understood. The parts that I did learn—X-bar theory, theta-roles, case assignment, binding principles, etc.—went on to be largely refuted in Syntax II, so it sat in a pretty awkward spot in the linguistics curriculum, where you can't go higher without properly understanding the basics, but the "higher" is going to turn around all the basics. Syntactic analysis connects pretty well to compilers and formal language theory too, so there are a lot of CS, math, and philosophy students sitting in the lecture (for the social science credit, perhaps?). It was a really low-stress, well-organized environment, and overall highly, highly recommendable to people who just want a "taste" of linguistics (for the rest of us actual LING majors—well, like I always say in course reviews, "you have no choice in front of you"). Raffaella, like most other professors in the linguistics department, is kind, knowledgeable, and approachable. I collaborated with her for three years in NACLO coaching.
Usefulness: 7/10; Difficulty: 3/10; Recommendation: 8/10.
LING 254 Syntax II: I took this course partly for the writing credit, partly because I want to write my senior essay on syntax (I did end up doing that, so it added up). Like I just said, the most memorable moment of this class for most folks who took this class is when Jim says "Forget everything you learned from Syntax I" and we start deriving everything from first principles again. The majority of the class is post-90s, post-00s syntax theory: minimalist program, phase theory, etc. It was unsettling, it was confusing, and almost every single question was unresolved. I walked out of the class knowing a bunch more but also knowing much less than when I first started. There was a final paper, but compared to the other classes with a term paper, it was frankly not much more challenging (we'll get to the real challenging ones). But it makes you really look like a pro sitting among other linguistics students when you can LARP about fancy words like "sluicing", and there's also an aspect of trauma bonding because your classmates share the same confusion.
Usefulness: 8/10; Difficulty: 8/10; Recommendation: 7/10.
LING 263 Semantics I: I took this course partly because I wanted to write my senior essay with Simon (that did not work out), partly because I thought "I cannot graduate without knowing what semantics is" (just like when I said to myself "I cannot graduate without knowing what Bayesian statistics is". It's good to know what you don't know!). The course did exactly what it promised: teaching me what semantics is. It did not teach me much about how to do semantics though. I took it as a senior, at which time I've already completed very advanced courses in compilers and formal languages, so predicate logic, lambda calculus, etc. had all become second instinct; unfortunately, a solid 1/3 of the course was purely about that, so it was entirely redundant for me. Overall, like many other intro-level linguistics classes, the class progressed at an exceedingly slow speed where every single derivation needed to be explained and demonstrated thoroughly, which is respectable, but also meant I sat through the lectures (at 9am!) without learning a great deal. And it did not enable me to LARP as a semanticist because I still don't understand most of the "cool" things like degree phrases. I flexed my LaTeX skills a lot drawing syntax trees annotated with lambda expressions though.
Usefulness: 5/10; Difficulty: 3/10; Recommendation: 6/10.
I took 3 classes related to phonetics and phonology: LING 232 Phonology I (semester 2), LING 643 Dynamics of Speech (semester 6), LING 336 Articulatory Phonology (semester 8).
LING 232 Phonology I: This is another required course of the major. I took it in a busy semester (we'll see why) which meant I procrastinated extraordinarily on my assignments. I basically submitted every assignment late by 2 weeks and also my squibs at the last instant before it became a trouble for the faculties (so huge thank-you to Natalie and Sammy for letting that slide). The class itself was in fact pretty disconnected from the majority of my P-side work: I work on phonetics and the quantitative aspects of human speech, which is largely incompatible with the discrete, symbolic approach of traditional phonology (e.g., rewrite rules). The computational linguistics class did use the same framework, but we only spent a few weeks on it and the theoretical background was fairly insignificant. Nevertheless, while I did have an okay understanding of syntax theory before, I knew absolutely nothing about phonology/phonetics (other than the IPA symbols used by English), so there were lots of useful bits, like feature theory, underlying form vs. surface form, etc. These really do make a difference in linguistics olympiads (because most participants have not heard of them), so I really wish I had seen them sooner!
Usefulness: 7/10; Difficulty: 5/10; Recommendation: 7/10.
LING 643 Dynamics of Speech: This is the only graduate-level course I took. In hind sight, I should have taken a few other courses at the grad level because there really wasn't that much of a difference, but this one in particular required me to write a term paper, which turned into my S&DS senior project the next semester. So that's pro #1. Pro #2 is the course used MATLAB extensively, a language I would absolutely not have touched otherwise; and the software we used continued to be useful in later courses. Pro #3 is it's technical, mathy (in a computational way), and gave me a ton of ideas about how phonology/phonetics "should work". Apart from the term paper (which was grad only), the assignments themselves were pretty unremarkable though.
Usefulness: 10/10; Difficulty: 5/10; Recommendation: 9/10.
LING 336 Articulatory Phonology: This is my 3rd and last course taken with Jason (excluding the senior essay class); in my four years he advised me on at least 4 projects, both independent and course-related. In my last semester, I'm already pretty well-trained with the whole research protocol but it was my first hands-on experience with lab work, in particular using EMA. Almost the entire course revolved around this single research project, and I made quite some contribution in experiment design and data processing. It turned out I wasn't a great experimenter, though—I did not succeed in sticking the sensors on the tongue. While we shared the same experimental data, each of us formed our own hypotheses and did our own data analysis. The term paper discovered some fairly interesting effects that I could dig deeper if I ever get the chance. My perception of this course is probably very skewed because I know both Jason's teaching style and this particular domain very well (LING 643 was helpful here), but I genuinely think it's one of the most productive and well-paced lab classes.
Usefulness: 9/10; Difficulty: 7/10; Recommendation: 9/10.
I took 4 classes that touch on both S-side and P-side knowledge: LING 110 Language: Introduction to Linguistics (semester 1), LING 231 Neurolinguistics (semester 2), LING 112 Historical Linguistics (semester 4), LING 380 Topics in Computational Linguistics: Subregular Linguistics (semester 7).
LING 110 Language: Introduction to Linguistics: One of the several "What ifs" I constantly have about my 4-year curriculum is what if I had not taken this course and had gone directly to LING 253 Syntax I (many LING majors skipped the intro). In a vacuum, I think it will make my life much better, because then I can have a much better time taking neurolinguistics, as well as free up a slot for more advanced linguistics electives. But in practice, I don't think that "What if" is ever going to happen, or even if so, I would actually end up better off in that world. The principal reason is that when I entered Yale I still had no idea if I wanted to do linguistics or not. I did linguistics olympiads in high school but that was a very distorted kind of linguistics, so in reality I didn't even know what "linguistics" entailed. It's good to see roadmap before committing. Furthermore it was packed with a bunch of "interesting trivia" that I would not have learned otherwise.
Usefulness: 5/10; Difficulty: 2/10; Recommendation: 6/10.
LING 231 Neurolinguistics: OK, here's the big one. I should spend some more time on this. I know a few folks in the department who hate this class with passion and there are some flaming comments on CourseTable to the point of being funny. I myself was deeply scarred by it. A few years later, the course code changed from 231 to 331 (3310 to be precise), presumably to make it look more like an advanced seminar class rather than a core elective. After four years and after taking a few other infamously hard courses (CPSC 323 Introduction to Systems Programming and Computer Organization and the French sequence, for example), I still consider this course to be way ahead in terms of workload and difficulty. Just to illustrate some work we have to do: (1) about 30–50 pages of paper reading every week, with short quizzes to test understanding; (2) mandatory discussion section that's sometimes just extra lecture with more interaction; (3) semester-long pilot study program, with proposal, term paper, and presentation; (4) two mid-term exams and one final exam.
I think my struggle in it didn't all have to do with the class itself. I took it at a bad time: (1) I haven't taken Syntax I, and it turned out that 70%+ of the class focused on syntax rather than phonology, and I didn't even understand what a long-distance dependency is at the time; (2) I took it in my first year when I didn't know much about the whole paper-reading, report-writing gig; by senior year, I could produce reading quizzes and term papers like a machine; (3) It was spring 2023, when ChatGPT was still nascent, so I actually have to read the papers—often scanned PDFs—back-to-back; I guess that's the intended training I was supposed to get, but it was needlessly time-consuming and exhausting. I rushed it because I needed a science credit (and it turned out to be an extremely wise decision, because this class wasn't offered my sophomore year!).
Nevertheless, I'm also the biggest proponent of it and named it my favorite class during my senior essay presentation. Looking back, if I have to name one course at Yale that fundamentally made me a better person, it has to be this one. First, it forced me onto a fast track to become a better researcher. Coming out of first year, I could already read papers and engage with / criticize them meaningfully; I could design experiments, form hypotheses, and put my ideas down into a paper; I could ask tons of questions in lectures. I also learned about the most frontier conclusions in neurolinguistics (so frontier that our exams' paper-reading problems literally gave us research published that month!) and after one semester's training could already independently understand most things in this research. It also busted some myths I had held, like "Broca's for production, Wernicke's for comprehension" (although I'm still a bit in the mist about what the alternative is; it seems it's a bit like "they both do these things, just with different proportions"). In my remaining 3 years, I had constantly applied the cognitive frameworks I learned in that class to other domains, let it be syntax, phonetics, or computational. Yes, it's hard; yes, I came out scarred and never wanting to do this again; yes, it's probably not for everyone; but also yes, I would recommend the me four years ago to go through the same pain, just with one caveat: please take Syntax I in your first fall!
Usefulness: 8/10; Difficulty: 10/10; Recommendation: 7/10.
LING 112 Historical Linguistics: This class had a really good reputation because it was taught by Claire. However the version I took had two changes: (1) the enrollment skyrocketed from 15 to 50 (probably because the STEM bros found a "hack" to earn their humanities/writing credit); (2) it was taught by Edwin. I'm not saying Edwin is a bad instructor, but I find myself engaged as much as I did in most linguistics courses, even the other intro courses with similar levels of enrollment. The class went as far as asking linguistics majors to sit in the back of the hall so we engage less and others engage more; I never listened in any lecture again. It was pretty average in terms of difficulty, but there were consistently some unhinged problems like "draw a poster for this particular research" or "illustrate this language phenomenon" that threw me off. I did learn lots of useful trivia that I could show off at nerdy gatherings (yes, if there's a single class that taught me party tricks, it would be this one), but I don't think I learned them in an enjoyable fashion.
Usefulness: 7/10; Difficulty: 4/10; Recommendation: 4/10.
LING 380 Topics in Computational Linguistics: Subregular Linguistics: I didn't take this class because there was anything I wanted to learn in particular (I already consider myself knowledgeable in most things about computational linguistics); I signed up because I convinced the S&DS department to take it as an S&DS elective. Well, I ended up learning an extremely niche topic that eventually became my senior essay with Kenneth being my advisor, so you always stumble into gold in the most unexpected corners. The class was about applying computation theory to language structure, and I happen to know something about computation and something about syntax (Syntax II level), so I survived it pretty well. There was a final project, but I cooked it up in 24 hours because I was swamped by the S&DS senior project. Luckily the class was really low stakes and everyone was super chill. I'm not sure the particular topic I learned (subregular linguistics) will ever be taught again though, and it's probably going back to the neural networks stuff.
Usefulness: 9/10; Difficulty: 6/10; Recommendation: 9/10.