Matthew has a masterful knowledge of all the material he teaches. He is a very well-spoken, effective lecturer but he does expect a lot from his students and, as such, grading can be harsher than your average ling class. Definitely make sure you come to lecture and participate in the in-class quizzes, as they help you tremendously when preparing for the transcription/production exam.

This class was interesting but actually very hard. In my opinion Professor Faytak expected a lot (maybe too much) out of us for people who hadn't had any phonetics training prior to this course. The production exam was okay, but I found the transcription exam to be very hard. The course also has a paper, and Professor Faytak was very unclear when it came to how it was graded - he basically said that it would be different for every language, which you can imagine was unhelpful. Definitely go to office hours frequently, I think it made him like me a lot more and ultimately contributed to him possibly bumping me. I really liked him and the class was fun but I think unnecessarily difficult.

A textbook is required for this class technically, but I didn't find myself needing to use it. His lectures are plenty informative.

Matt is very methodical and goes through the courseload thoughtfully. He will generally give extra details about articulatory phonetics, since that is his field of research, but you will learn less about acoustical phonetics. He will still tell you the basics of formants though, so if you want to go more into the acoustics side, you can take 104.

I found Matt's lectures easy to pay attention to. He knows how to talk to a class. He is also very good at answering questions in class and in office hours. You can benefit a lot from going to his OH, particularly if you want help with production (there is an exam at the end of the class in which you have to produce a lot of made-up words that are written with IPA symbols). The paper can take a while, but it's the only major assignment you have over the course of the class, so focus your efforts there. It can be very interesting if you make it so.

The issue I had with this class was the transcription exam. This is the final basically, so everyone goes into the classroom (where you discover half of the class never showed up to lectures), and he plays recordings he made in rural China or wherever, and you have to transcribe the words in IPA. It was very difficult, because I was in a spot where the speakers were less prominent, and the A/C was blasting, which I don't think can be turned off in PubAff, so it was hard to hear the recordings (and you have to be sensitive to very fine phonetic detail). Everyone seemed to have problems though, because he curved the exam. I did about as well as I expected in the end, so it all worked out, and it's a minor complaint.