While it was challenging, these skills are invaluable to any linguist. Having known about the IPA and a general idea of what the symbols represented, it was extremely satisfying to finally understand everything they actually meant after completion. You also get to train your ear to hear sounds whose differences you otherwise wouldn't have realised.

Definitely the hardest linguistic subject. It doesn't matter how on top of the content you are, if you haven't trained your ears to hear the differences in sounds you're not going to do well. I had to put in hours and hours doing the listening exercises only to be getting 60% correct. At the same time, I loved this subject. It was really interesting and getting to make funny sounds in a tute for an hour a week was great fun. Basically the whole first half of the subject is just learning how the IPA works and how to actually produce all of the sounds yourself. The second half is looking at suprasegmental phonetics (like tone and stress) and Australian English. The assessments are all transcription exercises (which are really hard for the reasons I mentioned above) and there is a transcription component to the exam. The written exam itself is not too bad though. This subject is an absolute must if you're majoring in linguistics, and I'd recommend it if you're interested in languages as a breadth, but keep in mind that the ear training is really difficult. Would highly recommend.

For being a core subject, the content was quite interesting and easy to follow considering that phonetics/phonology isn't my favourite part of linguistics. Josh was an incredible tutor and made sure we understood each concept during the tutorials. He would frequently do revision in class, which was very helpful, as each topic built on from the previous. The assessments were all manageable, but the second one was a bit challenging as we had not done much work on tones and that was one of the focal points. The final exam was well-structured and easy to follow, and they had prepared us well for the types of questions that would be asked in the lectures and the tutorials.

Don’t take this subject unless you have to. Content was not explained well enough and both our lecturer and tutors assumed we should just understand. Assignment 1 was ok but assignment 2 was completely ridiculous. Transcribing Thai tones when we only covered a tiny bit on tones?? Way too much content crammed into 12 weeks and has not been as enjoyable as I would have liked. On the brighter side I have learnt a lot about aus English and the different branches of phonetics.

Debbie and Josh did a great job at coordinating Phonetics. Countless revision activities are provided on the LMS, which assist with both ear training and theoretical knowledge. The tutorials really helped with clarifying some of the more difficult aspects of the lectures. Marking is fair and all assessment tasks are accessible.

I don't know why people are complaining about this subject, I thought it was great, all linguistics subjects were great haha

The first half of this subject covering articulatory phonetics is somewhat interesting. Where it got tedious and sort of confusing was the auditory phonetics part of the course. Tutes weren't that helpful either, in my opinion. Stay on top of the content as much as you can, especially the IPA and practical phonetics units on the LMS that help with the transcription assessments a bit. The exam was pretty straightforward also.

This subject was boring but also requires a hefty amount of work. If you're majoring in linguistics and you have to do it then make sure you keep up and do as much practice stuff as possible - there are quite a lot of resources provided. And get on to memorising the IPA. If you don't have to do it then I wouldn't recommend it.

Involves mostly memorising the IPA chart. Tuts are spent going over the sounds of the IPA and assignments are listening and transcribing exercises (That i found very difficult to distinguish by ear, but might've been just me!) Exam is just lecture content. Overall its all very straightforward and nothing unexpected or too difficult.