Professor Yuan is a great professor, and I couldn't recommend her more for this class. She's a very clear and organized lecturer and posts slides and recordings to make it easy to review. The content can definitely be a bit confusing, but she presents it clearly and makes it really easy to get help with office hours, and the discussions were useful to get practice with the material as well (shoutout to Laura for being a great TA).

The grading consisted of weekly quizzes that were worth a small portion of the grade, homework due every two weeks, discussion attendance, and the final. The quizzes and homework were pretty straightforward, and the homework regularly included extra credit so it wasn't difficult to get 100% in that category. The final was reasonably difficult but also had an extra credit problem, which helped a lot.

I think whether or not you enjoyed the syntax portion of Ling 1 or Ling 20 should be a good indication of whether you'll like this class, even though you don't end up using much from those classes. I personally enjoyed the syntax part of both of those classes and I thought 120B was really interesting and engaging. Everything in the course builds on itself week by week, so it's important to stay on track with the lectures. The material definitely got more complex as the course went on, but if you're good with logical thinking I think it's pretty easy to catch on to building the trees. Overall, Professor Yuan makes it easy to succeed in the class and I'd highly recommend her as a professor.