I’m not taking any linguistics classes this quarter, so I won’t be posting to this blog regularly for the time being. I may come back occasionally, if I come across a random thought. I will back here again, once I start my next class. That will be in the fall quarter, if not the summer.
At this point, it looks like I will not be signing up for another class next quarter. It’s not a final judgement on whether or not I will be going for the degree, but at this point I want to allow myself some time to work on my programming projects instead. I may use some of this time to study up some more on the different subfields within the liguistics major to see which interests me enough motivate me some more. However, I want to make sure that I don’t user all of my extra free time just screwing around. I’ll have to lay out some concrete programming goals.
My primary textbook is Language, its Structure and Use, by Edward Finegan. I remember seeing these books around somewhere before - probably during my days at UCI. (Of course, I just checked the copyright on it, and it only dates back to 2003. However, it is a fifth edition, so the previous editions may have an earlier copyright. Not sure how that works. Anyway, five editions over the past ten years or so seems pretty reasonable.) It’s not as exciting a read as the Pinker book, but that’s to be expected. So far so good. I don’t have much else to say about it right now, bad or good. I’m going to read chapter three this weekend (on phonetics), then get started on the short essay assigned. I’ll probably knock that out this weekend too, unless I end up going out (doubtful because of the rain).
I decided to log the progression of my linguisitics studies. Currently, I’m just getting started and am in the first week of an online introduction course to the subject via UCLA’s extension program. The plan is to figure out how much I actually like it and if I want to continue with it. I read one one of the class’s textbooks over the holidays (Stephen Pinker’s The Language Instinct) and enjoyed reading it. The first week’s homework and reading assignment on morphology was also pretty cool.
Page 1 / 1