Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics
Universiteit Leiden · View on Coursera ↗
Taught by Marc van Oostendorp
Language LearningArts and Humanities
About the course
Everywhere, every day, everybody uses language. There is no human society, no matter how small or how isolated, which does not employ a language that is rich and diverse. This course introduces you to linguistics, featuring interviews with well-known linguists and with speakers of many different languages. Join us to explore the miracles of human language! The Miracles of Human Language introduces you to the many-faceted study of languages, which has amazed humans since the beginning of history
The dissent
The most-upvoted critical review (41 votes, 2.0★).
“The course itself is fine. The quizzes, however, are so frustrating as to lower the enjoyment of the whole thing. Numerous answers are just factually wrong. You end up retaking the quiz time and again and then selecting random answers just to pass.”
Coursera's 4.7 comes from 2,521 ratings. Of those, 2.7% are 1–2★.
Starisk reads the reviews learners voted most helpful, and weights each by the square root of its votes: a review with 80 upvotes counts about five times one with 2. Unvoted reviews are not skipped out of laziness — by this model they carry no evidence that other students endorsed them.
That measures what the most-endorsed reviews say, not “true quality.” The rating distribution above is the whole population, so you can see the sample next to it.
Reviews read on 23 Oct 2026.Read them on Coursera ↗