Victoria is a truly amazing professor! She makes lectures very interactive and engaging, and very happily answers people's questions. Her passion for the subject matter is very apparent- you can see the excitement in her eyes. Additionally, in her office hours, she is always extremely helpful and patiently clarifies concepts. She also replies to emails pretty promptly. If you have questions, don't hesitate to ask Victoria!

The homework is very manageable- there's about one assignment per week. It is graded on accuracy but it's not overly difficult and most of the answers can be found in the slides.

There are two open note exams, and again, are relatively easy if you (1) pay attention in class, (2) try on the homework, and (3) do some studying on your own time.

I really loved Victoria and her class and will miss having this class. What we learned was so interesting, and Victoria is such a caring professor so taking SPAN M35 is soo worth it!

I learned so much in this class! Very sad this course is coming to an end. Professor Mateu is super clear, helpful, and engaging in all of her lectures. She provides lots of supplemental material, so it's super easy and accessible to practice some of the harder concepts (not that there are too many challenging concepts). The homework is fair, a very clear reflection of the course material, and the questions appropriately prepare you for the midterm and final exams (both of which are online, timed, and very reasonable). As long as you show up to class, engage with the material, and apply yourself the slightest bit, I assure you you'll find yourself feeling interested by the coursework and lectures. Had Isabel as a TA- she is very lovely: willing to help out wherever she can, super caring.

TLDR: Great professor, very hard GE

Victoria is a very knowledgable and helpful professor. Her lectures are engaging and well prepared. However, this is a very difficult GE. Lectures are 110 minutes which often caused burnout for myself and my classmates around halfway through class. Victoria attempts to combat this by having a break mid class but it is still very long. This is worsened by the amount of content she covers each day. Each lecture is filled with new concepts and little practice, so actual comprehension of course material often falls to times outside of class. During section, TAs help guide students through practice sets of class material which is helpful. With good utilization of office hours, section attendance and participation, and thorough notes, a good grade is possible. Note that this class is very demanding and very unforgiving if a concept is not understood before deciding to take it as a GE.

The grading scale for this class goes like this: 45% Assignments, 25% Midterm, 25% Final, and 5% Attendance/Participation.

Professor Mateu is one of the most kindest and intellectual professors I know, who always maintained a big smile throughout lecture throughout the entirety of the quarter. She was always more than willing to answer questions in class and emphasized that every student attended at least one of either her office hours or the TA's (I didn't... oops). She was an accommodating professor that understood the pressures University students struggle with and was just overall an amazing professor/ person. I definitely feel that if I put more effort into utilizing the extensive resources she offers I could have gotten an A, but honestly this class was easy enough to put minimal effort and get a passing grade.

There were six assignments throughout the quarter where 3 were worth 5% and 3 were worth 10%. To be quite honest, the answers could be derived from the lecture slides. Although the answers were not the same, her slides contain sufficient examples that allow you to understand the concept and apply it yourself on the homework. It helped a lot to go to lecture, but if you didn't go, you would still be okay on the assignments. Ask for help if you need it though!!! I promise that both the TAs and the professor would be more than ecstatic to help you out. I never received anything less than a B+ (they're all going to be curved btw) and that's with me starting the night before and simply trying my best. Also, do not start the homeworks the night before!!! It can become extremely overwhelming and if you have a question it might be too late to get a quick enough response from the professor or the TAs.

The exams were open note and were taken online. They were not difficult, as you could look things up on your lecture slides, but you also had to know the information to figure out where to find it. Be sure to study for it a little bit, as some of the questions on these exams ask you to apply these skills yourself like: transcription, syntax trees, etc. With light studying, I managed to get at least a B on both exams.

For attendance and participation, you literally just had to show up to discussion and lecture. Unfortunately you have to be there because a sign in sheet is passed around class at the beginning where you have to put your UID and sign. However, if you miss too many classes, it shouldn't be that bad on your grade, given that it is only 5% of it.

If you're looking for a GE that covers the Linguistic category (or sumn like that) definitely take this one. The professor was a delight and despite some of the lectures being boring, Victoria tried making it as engaging as possible while also giving us all this knowledge. If you just try on the assignments and do some light studying every now and then, I guarantee you will get a passing grade. Do not be scared to ask for help!

Took this class as a GE and loved it! Even though it's not required, it's really helpful if you know Spanish or Portuguese since a lot of the examples are in Spanish/Portuguese. I wouldn't recommend taking the class if you don't have any background with either language, otherwise you might have a lot more difficulty learning the material, especially since you need to come up with examples on the hw in Spanish or Portuguese. We didn't need to write any papers, but there were weekly hw assignments that were graded on accuracy. Since the class was asynchronous, the lectures were all posted on CCLE. The lectures can be kind of lengthy though, and you had to watch them before Tuesday at 9am even if your discussion was on another day. For participation, there'd be a couple of questions embedded throughout the lectures that you had to answer and submit, but you as long as you try your best to answer most of them, it's okay if you leave some blank. The material for the most part was pretty straightforward, but I think the hardest concept in class was learning the IPA and phrase structure trees. Overall, I'd recommend taking this class!