Yafei is very nice, knowledgeable, and always asks students if they understand the concepts. However, the lack of slides, frequent tangents, and lack of drawing trees made this one of the most stressful classes I have ever taken. I feel like I learned a lot, but wish the topics were covered with more clarity.

If you don't have to take this class for a Linguistics requirement, don't take it. If you have to take the class, wait for a different professor. He spent the entire semester teaching concepts then undoing what he had taught and re-teaching them in a more complex way--this made the course so unnecessarily confusing and nearly impossible to follow.

Entire course is graded on two assignments and two exams. Complete examples are rarely given in class and very few other resources are made available online to help with trees. Exam questions are confusingly worded and heavily weighted. He ended up having to adjust letter grade values to make a 65% a B. Would not have passed without this curve.

No lecture aids, no ppt or slide shows so virtually impossible to take notes; weekly files difficult to comprehend. I strongly recommend you to not take this class unless you are extremely interested in Syntax.

He is clearly very smart, but not a good teacher. He doesn't bring any aids to lectures for students to follow along with; no slides, handouts, outlines, etc. He uploads very helpful files to Canvas at the end of each week, but then you have to power through the week on alone before reteaching yourself everything on the weekends from the files.

I am shocked at the amount of 5's he has. The lack of preparedness, organization, and resources for students shines through in his teaching and you are almost set up to fail. Unless you have a multitude of background knowledge in syntax I strongly recommend you do not take this class.

He expects so much and does not appreciate questions. There are only 4 graded assignments including exams all semester. If you have the choice to not take this professor, I would HIGHLY recommend finding another option.

Lectures are 75 minutes long with few to no visual aids. Never draws complete syntax trees. Rambles a lot to the point that I'm never sure whether or not what he's saying is important information. Homework grading criteria is very unclear. Clearly a very smart man but not a good teacher.

I took this class having never taken a linguistics class. It was difficult to understand the concepts and terminology without any linguistics background, but the professor is sweet and enthusiastic. Grading is easy and Yafei Li is one of the sweetest professors out there. There were no assignments, tests, or textbook--only a paper and presentation.

Yafei is a fun guy, but his class is very inaccessible. Trees are rarely drawn, and he's so specific about how he wants things that you can't look elsewhere for help. Lectures are him just talking for 1.25 hours with very few visual aids. Really sweet person but not a great class.

75 minutes of this class in one sitting was horrendous and I felt like I learned nothing. Yafei was clearly very intelligent, but he couldn't figure out the online format and as a result his lectures were impossible to benefit from. His test questions were very poorly worded and there were many things he barely covered in class.

Nothing personal but he was terrible this semester as a professor. If he wanted to help his students succeed this semester, he should have prepared over the Summer like everyone other professor and recognized that he would have to deliver things differently. If he struggled to draw trees online, there were options that he could have done.

Too many MC's that were vague and hard to understand. No trees drawn. Skip if online. Did not give answers to homework until just before the final.

If you are a visual learner and we are online, I'd advise to skip this course if you can. No trees were drawn and while some people are still successful, it was very difficult for me personally. This isn't anything against the prof., but personally it just didn't work to not see what we were learning.

This class was online this semester (covid-19) and so the Prof did not have the leisure of a blackboard to draw trees while explaining concepts in class. Nor did the onlineplatform allow for ease of drawing trees. This coupled with the Prof. struggle with online technology led to concepts being explained well, but no trees ever drawn in class.

Nice person, but online teaching skills do not transfer well, it's very hard to understand/follow. He does very little examples of trees since he struggles with online format, but those examples are needed when you're unfamiliar with syntax. If there's the chance you can skip while we're online, take it. 1st quiz 5 MC Q's (50pt) 3 trees (50pts).

Really, really sweet guy! In LING309, he just talks about whatever he wants to talk about, and it usually ends up being pretty interesting! There are only a few graded assignments, but he makes the class so low-stress that it is not a worry. Fun to be around!

I thought about majoring in Linguistics prior to this class. i was not aware of how dry it could be. He is a fair grader on tests and very approachable and helpful outside of class. Go to office hours!

He is extremely knowledgeable about syntax, very approachable and makes an effort to explain when you don't understand. He makes a lot of jokes during class and draws trees like a pro. I found him to be a great teacher and will be taking Ling 530 just to take another class with him. Lenient grader. You get points for handing in the homework.

Maybe a little too smart for his own good. He seems to have a hard time when people don't understand what he's saying. He's clearly a genius and gets excited to be teaching, but I'm still not really convinced. Also, we had weekly homework due that did't count for anyhing. That was annoying.

Although a great professor,always available to help out his students,the material was hard.It's all cumulative and if you don't get the fundamentals at the very beginning DROP THE CLASS.He assigned homework every week but didn't grade them, sadly,midterms worth 25% each and final was 50%!! Good prof but bad subject and poor distribution of grades.

Great proff! This class had no homework or tests. The whole thing rode on one end of term paper. You choose the subject, you choose how long. Knew a guy who wrote his paper on expletives as infixes! It was great!

I LOVE him! He is enthusiastic and approachable. Explains everything and answers questions clearly. He really wants you to understand the subject matter.

I've never seen someone get so excited about sentence structure. He draws the fastest trees in the west. Very well-designed class. Hard material sometimes but very clear presentation and tests are straightforward.