Trying to switch from Literature to Linguistics: similar experience and/or advices?

Somehow I stumbled upon this old question of mine. Having done what I asked help for (obviously did not get any answers, but even the upvotes were helpful, which I took as "hey, you're not alone in this!"), I want to briefly document my process.

I have been studying since around when I made this post. My course has been roughly as such:

• University of Leiden's Linguistics MOOC on Coursera. The excercises and homeworks were badly put together, but videos and other material were very useful for a broad albeit shallow overview of the main interests of the different fields of linguistics.

• Many videos from the Virtual Linguistics Campus project of the University of Marburg, which were quite helpful.

• A few videos from around the web I collected into a playlist. Not all of them are really helpful, and I did not watch each and every one of them (but most). Was useful tho.

• Select chapters from The Handbook of Linguistics eds. Aronoff, Rees-Miller. Was difficult for a beginner, but still incredibly informative. Most chapters are quite good at giving a neutral, multi-theoretical overview of the subdisciplines they document.

• An Introduction to Language by Fromkin, Rodman, Hyams. A wonderful introductory textbook to the discipline. One major problem is though that it does not talk about non-mainstream theories. Does not really mention construction grammar, for example. But maybe more recent editions fix that (I had the seventh, from 2003 or 2004 IIRC). One great thing is that it has excercises after each chapter, which really help with comprehension.

• For sociolinguistics, Language In Society by Suzanne Romaine (1994) is a good text, albeit possibly a bit out of date. I just finished this, and loved it.

• I am currently reading Language Contact: An Introduction by Sarah G. Thomason, which is a well praised introductory text to contact and variation studies.

• I am planning to read in near future:

  • Understanding Phonology by Gussenhoven and Jacobs, for a deeper understanding of phonology, one of the most elementary fields of research of the discipline.

  • Discourse and Identity by Benwell and Stokoe for a better understanding of discourse analysis in the context of identity.

  • Possibly: Construction Grammar and its Application to English by Martin Hilpert, which I discovered today, for a comprehensive introduction to the construction grammar theory. The author have published a playlist of video lectures that summarise what is found in the book.

Hope it helps!