Great professor who is really passionate about the subject! Since this was an 8am and I am not a morning person, focusing in class was sometimes a little hard. However, the professor did try to engage the class during lectures. Her slides are very helpful, and have a lot of problems to practice for the quizzes and exams. This is important because methods that the textbook and the study guide associated with it use don't always match up with her methods.
Her quizzes and exams are very do-able as long as you've been keeping up with the weekly homework. She also gives up to 3% extra credit for doing SONA studies.
Also, Alex is a great TA. His discussion section and office hours were very helpful and fun.

Taking Ling 20 with Professor Rasekhi was very interesting, and not too difficult! She is a fantastic lecturer, tries to engage the class with questions and discussions, and is very helpful if you go to her office hours! You can tell she genuinely cares about her students, on both academic and personal levels. I would highly recommend her to anyone thinking about taking Ling 20 as a GE or major pre-req. I'm also selling the study guide workbook (required), very lightly used, email me at ************* if interested!

This class was more of a mixed bag - not necessarily based on the content, which was pretty interesting, but mostly based on how the content was presented. The professor explained the concepts in a pretty plain and boring manner that did its job most of the time, but often I felt that self-studying through the homework exercises was more useful than listening to lecture sometime. It definitely was sort of disappointing knowing that the material could be much more engaging, especially with more discussions about other languages, but instead, the end result of the teaching was sort of average. The weekly homework, taken from the textbook, is rather tedious and does its job in forcing you to learn the concepts, but is not really engaging, doesn't expand on the concepts in linguistics at all, and is almost only English-language based. For someone interested in linguistics, this class was disappointing, but not necessarily bad or too difficult.

This class was really easy unlike what everyone else, who has taken Ling 20, has told me. The professor is really clear in her explanation of the material and doesn’t give you any false expectations about what will be on the quizzes (2 of them), midterm and final. That said, I only prepared minimally for the midterm and final and wound up with A’s for both of them. The only tedious part of the class was the homework, but she gives you an entire week to do them. And the homework would only take up—at most—an hour to do; however, the homework ended up being a great study tool for the assessments, so make sure to try on them. Overall, the quality of the class was incredibly valuable, and it gave me a good taste of future linguistics classes. Definitely worth taking this professor, despite being an 8 AM.

I took this class as a requirement for Linguistics major. I had taken Ling 1 before so a lot of the information in this class was already covered in that class. Ling 1 taught a lot of specific things, whereas Ling 20 teaches the more general concept, but a lot of the exercises you do will be similar. Homework is the biggest part of the class I'd say, and it's due during lecture. You'll definitely want to try and get the most points as possible because this is the bulk of your grade 40%! The problems covered in the homework are also similar to what will show up on the quizzes and tests. Quizzes are very easy, and midterm and final are part multiple choice, but mostly written and definitely reflective of what is covered in class. She also offers extra credit for sona studies which is great to have but I honestly don't think you will need it.

I think she is one of those cases where she is so specialized in one field that she sometimes doesn't know how to explain certain things or forgets basic ideas. This can be frustrating when it seems unclear what she is trying to say, and sometimes she might sound like she is contradicting herself. Honestly not that big of a deal, but if this is your first linguistics class, some of the back-and-forth she does might get confusing.

She posts slides and I think bruin casts, so it's not imperative to go to lecture except to turn in homework, and I definitely skipped a few. I'd say the lectures on syntax might be a good one to attend if you're planning to skip a lot (especially if yours is at 8am like mine was), as she sometimes has a certain way she wants the answers presented.

The textbook is helpful for sure just to have a point of reference, and it's where most of the homework will come from. There is an accompanying workbook, but it's definitely not necessary as I barely used it, and on the rare case that there is a HW problem from it you can ask a friend.

Overall, this was a very easy class and I would recommend it especially to other Ling. majors and maybe even as a GE :)

Homework is 40%, quizzes are 5%, the midterm is 20%, the final is 30%, and participation in discussion is 5%. You can also get up to 3% extra credit for participating in SONA studies (1% per study) Overall the class isn't too difficult as long as you start the homework early. I definitely recommend doing the homework with someone else because they can be a little difficult. Professor Rasekhi doesn't take attendance and her slides are posted on CCLE so you can get away with not going to class, but I think it's pretty helpful for some of the topics (especially phonetics)

Professor Rasekhi herself is a pretty good professor. Lectures are engaging enough and she does a good job clarifying things. I'd take her class again.

She was one of my favorite professors at UCLA. She is very friendly, caring, approachable, and helpful. Homework assignments were not too hard to get over 90% on in my opinion. Some questions were a bit difficult in the beginning, but I thought it was easier to get 100% on the homework towards the second half. I got 100% on all the quizzes and on the midterm. They were similar to the homework assignments and problems in the workbook. She gives up to 3% extra credit for doing SONA studies. The workload in the class is not too bad. It involves 1 homework assignment per week. I ended up getting over 100% in the class and got an A+. I'd say it isn't too difficult to get an A in her class. At no point was I worried about not getting an A.

Grade Breakdown:
Weekly homework assignments 40% (lowest homework grade will be dropped)
Quizzes 5%
Midterm exam 20%
Final exam 30%
Participation 5%
Extra credit (for SONA experiments) up to 3%

I love Professor Vahideh, she is so kind and really cares about students learning. I took this Spring 2020, so it was her first online course and she really tried to take all feedback that students gave to her into account and improve her course. The lectures are thorough and really explain all of the topics well. The homework can be a bit challenging but if you work on it with other in your class it makes it a lot easier. My TA was Kinda and she also always tried to explain everything really well if you didn't understand. Also the two required materials for this class are both free PDF's online so you don't have to purchase anything which is really nice. I encourage anyone to take this class because although I am pre-med and only took this class because it was the only GE I could get into (as she was nice enough to give me a PTE #), I found it very interesting and learned a lot. The exams were not that difficult because there were all open note (meaning the quizzes and midterm and final) so if you did all the homework and studied for about an hour, it was pretty straightforward which I liked. There were never any surprises on her tests and she really did try to make each question like one we discussed in class or in our sections. Take this class to learn a bit more about linguistics and meet her, she's a great professor!

Profesor Rasekhi was so nice and accommodating this quarter! Honestly it got off to a bit of a rough start with adjusting to the Zoom environment, but after the mid-quarter survey she definitely made some changes based on feedback.

For the first quiz, a lot of people felt crunched for time (we had 30 minutes), so she gave us a full 2 hours for the second quiz.

The homework each week was really straightforward and useful for preparing for the quizzes. The midterm was pretty much just like a combination of the quizzes and homework. There was one question that was more challenging than the homework and a lot of people had trouble with, and Rasekhi ended up converting that question to extra credit! I'm not sure what the final was like since it was made optional.

Each week, there's a discussion handout that the TAs send out through email. Sometimes it wouldn't get sent out until the night before discussion, but I found that attempting it before discussion was really useful for getting the most out of it and helping to move the discussion along. As a sidenote, I had Kinda as my TA and she was great!

I learned a ton and this class really inspired me to pursue a sci-tech in linguistics. I definitely recommend taking this class if you have even a minor interest in linguistics!

Took this class as a GE and it was an easy A. The grading really does change from TA to TA, so keep that in mind. I found it helpful going to office hours quite frequently. There was a learning curve with this being online (our first quiz was a disaster). All the testing material is pretty similar to the homework and some questions come directly from the study guide book.