Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!bellcore!uunet!tdatirv!sarima From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: Chinese room -- Empirical tests Message-ID: <74@tdatirv.UUCP> Date: 5 Dec 90 20:29:01 GMT References: Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen) Distribution: comp Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine Lines: 20 In article ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Henry Thompson) writes: >1) Could you learn Chinese (or any other natural language) as a second >language using ONLY a monolingual Chinese (or ...) dictionary? No way. Even if the dictionary had pictures for some of the terms it would still be wholly inadequate. There is no way to determine the meaning of most terms simply from the dictionary itself. Also, the examples of the usage in a dictionary are generally insufficient to derive the full grammar of the language. [I have managed to translate from Russian to English using a *bilingual* dictionary, but Russian is an Indoeuropean language, and the text was very simple in structure, with few difficult constructs (like verbs)]. >2) How about as a first language? No, and for the same reasons. -- --------------- uunet!tdatirv!sarima (Stanley Friesen)