I ended up getting a good grade, but this class is very very difficult and stressful. If you don't have a firm grounding in linguistics, you will not be comfortable in this class. However, I don't think you could find a nicer professor on campus. I learned a lot, but I also stressed a lot.

Donka is pretty demanding. Her notes and lecture can be difficult to follow, but what you retain will give you a vantage especially in courses on older or foreign lit. She's pretty funny in her own way, and by the end of the course, you'll probably feel a surprising affection for her. My friend and I hated her at the time but absolutely adore her now. Make up sexual examples for what you need to learn - you'll have a lot more fun and will remember EVERYTHING.

I think other people are being a bit unfair on Prof. Minkova. I took English 121 and found that it was generally quite enjoyable. While I agree with the rest of my classmates in that she tends to drone on and has this amazing quality to her voice that actually makes you want to fall asleep, if you resist, what she says is what she tests you on, which makes the class very straightforward. I wrote detailed notes from her lectures and found that I didn't really need to read the reader for the class and still got an A+. I couldn't really understand why more people didn't do better - she is very fair (i.e. very lenient) in her marking and she tells you beforehand exactly what she will test you on, so if you prepare what she said then this class should be a breeze. It would also appear that she is a genuinely nice lady, who offers plenty of opportunities to talk to her if you don't understand something. I highly recommend her.

Well, I won't say the material was easy. Or that I really knew all that well what was going on in the class. The structure of the class itself was confusing; it felt a lot like taking history 1a because there is so much to fit into 10 weeks, that you just kind of skip around. A LOT. I went to almost every lecture, and read the reader only to refer to for homework and before quizzes. I am a linguistics major, and still found the material confusing, because there is no definite set point to learn, you just have to memorize a lot of facts and changes about the English language. Some of it is intuitive, and some of it is not. She IS a very lenient grader, as I only knew vaguely what was going on most of the time, but got full credit for what i thought were incomplete answers, and although i got 50% on the first quiz (worth something like 15% of your grade?), i still got a flat out A in the class. Take this class if you have a very, very specific interest in the nitty gritty details of the history of the English language.

Like everyone before me, she's a nice person. However, her lectures are horrible and her course reader is someone difficult to understand. Lectures were very dull and boring, and her jokes were never funny. I really was interested in the subject-and still am-but the way she lectured put me to sleep within the first 5 minutes of class. You get a lot out of reading the course reader, but it may take 2 or 3 times to understand what's going on since lectures aren't very helpful. The quizzes are someone difficult but fair because she'll let you know pretty much the entire layout of the quiz beforehand. If you take 121, I'm making it clear now that it's not a normal history class. The first 2 weeks is history, everything else is almost like learning equations. Just study the course reader and you should be fine. Go to class too since she makes a habit of assigning things and changing dates without emailing her students. Not recommended, in my opinion.