28 tips for doing better in your Intro Linguistics course (Now with bonus tips for doing worse!)

science-of-noise:

allthingslinguistic:
Just in time for back to school, here are some tips for doing better on your linguistics assignments from someone who’s marked a few hundred of them over the years.
General:
1. Read the question. The easiest mistake to fix: if the question says circle the error and fix it, make sure you do both, or if the question asks for three examples, make sure you give three and not two or four. If the question asks for a transcription, don’t give a translation, and so on. Before you pass something in, read it over to make sure the question and the answer match.
2. Use only the necessary words. In grade school, you may have been asked to answer in complete sentences. That doesn’t really matter anymore: what matters is that you show that you understand the material. Linguistics problem sets aren’t essay questions, so a short phrase may be totally sufficient.
3. Use the technical words that you’ve been learning (but don’t use the other ones you found on Wikipedia). Part of what you’re being tested on is your ability to use technical vocabulary, so you should say “transitive verb” instead of “an action word that has both a person who did the thing and a person who the thing is done to”.
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Tips for doing worse in your Intro Linguistics course:
1. Remember that NLP means “neuro-linguistic programming” and “neuro-linguistic programming” only. No, don’t look it up. Just use it like this.
2. Refer to Indo-European as “Japhetic.”
3. Instead of LaTeX, write up your assignments in Word, except for anything that requires a tree or IPA transcription. Print it out and draw these in by hand. Your professor will appreciate your contemporary artwork.
4. Print out a blank IPA chart. Fill it in in real-time with sounds you hear in class. When you complete a row or column, shout /bɪŋgow/.
5. Bring a book to class and read when you get bored. Whenever you see an exclamation point on the page, make a click sound with your tongue.
6. Learn some Latin poetry. When your professor states that Latin is a not a living language, stand up and loudly correct her with your mastery of Catullus 16.

Filed under: “Posts I should have written instead of this one” :)

7. Take all your notes in IPA. They’ll gradually get less and less nonsensical as your mastery of IPA improves over the course of the semester.

8. IPA refers, of course, to India Pale Ale. It makes an excellent invisible ink.

9. The reason you need invisible ink is because all linguists do, in fact, speak a dozen languages and are secretly spies.

10. Keep the remainder of your IPA close at hand. Drinking before attempting to enunciate any unfamiliar words or sounds will make you much more fluent at them.

11. Every time your professor or a classmate says something that is not consistent with your dialect, this makes them an enemy to Civilization As We Know It.

12. A wug is a code name for the enemy. They must be prevented from gathering in groups of two or more. Mortally, if necessary.

3The Only Dream That Matters Is the One You Wake Up From