In college, every major comes with unique circumstances that require certain tools.
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If you’re studying linguistics, you’re going to encounter a handful of assignments that need special resources. For the organized amateur linguist, I have made a list of resources that I found helpful for my linguistics classes:
Often, there will be times in linguistics when a standard keyboard won’t be enough, specifically, if you’re taking any course related to the phonetics or phonology of any language. There are plenty of languages with sounds that don’t even exist in English. That’s where this handy dandy keyboard comes in. Sensibly organized, this keyboard is a collection of every special character and diacritic in the IPA and has the bonus of allowing you to combine symbols for narrow transcriptions. Simply type what you need in the text box and copy and paste it into your paper.
The Ling Space is dedicated to linguistic education. I was introduced to their YouTube channel in my Phonetics and Phonology class. I loved their visuals and the examples they used to explain their topics. They also do interviews and have their videos organized into playlists by discipline, so feel free to have a binge session learning about Language Acquisition.
If you’re a fan of following blogs, All Things Linguistic is one of my favorite linguistics blogs. The blog shares insight into studying linguistics, working in the field, and other handy resources. Regularly, I follow their series Linguistics jobs. ATL interviews professionals who all have linguistics degrees, learning if and how they apply linguistics to their current jobs. There are professionals in and outside of academia and in realms of work you might not expect.
From the first day you start learning syntax, it’s obvious just how messy it can become when sentences are complicated. If you’re not a fan of handwriting trees, this website has come to the rescue. Simply write your syntax in bracket notation in the text box, and the site will transform it into a syntax tree image file that you can download or copy and paste into your papers. Sometimes, you might lose track of when the brackets are coming and going and end up with a wonky tree. When that happens, you can hit the back button and shift things around.
For those unaware, Google Scholar is Google's scholarly resource search bar. Google Scholar wasn’t made specifically for linguistics, and you might have used it in high school. Nevertheless, it’s a convenient resource that some people still don’t know about. When conducting academic research in any subject, you must make sure the sources that you cite are reliable or at least peer-reviewed. Your college may have its own resources accessible through its library, and Google Scholar is a great supplement.
Praat is another useful resource for studying Phonetics. When I studied Phonetics and Phonology, my professor required us to download it for her class. Praat is a free program rife with features including speech analysis, synthesis, and manipulation. In class, we used this software to learn how to analyze Spectrograms. Throughout your education, you may use many of its other features.
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