Re: Argh! General frustration and steam-letting

On Mon, 30 Jul 2007 05:25:02 GMT, Dorothy J Heydt
<djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in <news:JLz8Dq.C2r@xxxxxxxxxxx>
in rec.arts.sf.composition:

[...]

The first course in the graduate division for the UCB Linguistics
department was practice fieldwork. Sit down with a native
speaker (preferably of something obscure) and work with him to
learn the structure of his language and write a description of
it. There were about six of us in my class, and we worked on
Amharic.

We used to have an applied linguistics course here that was
done that way. It was an undergraduate course, but in my
opinion it was taught at about first-year graduate level,
and you couldn't get into it without the instructor's
approval. My ex-wife took it, so I got a very good idea of
what was expected. As I recall, the instructor managed to
find a native speaker of a different non-IE language for
everyone in the class, though after all this time I remember
only that they included Japanese and Yoruba. Anne wound up
with a very nice Japanese girl whose English was minimal,
and they became quite good friends; I gather that not
everyone was so fortunate.

It was a hell of a lot of work, but a *very* good course.

Brian
.

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