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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
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Date: Wed, 8 Feb 1995 17:30:10 GMT
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In article <D3nopD.8zI@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>In article <D3L6M2.I1I@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>,
>Jeff Dalton <jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>>In article <D3C4uG.DFK@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>>>>>Some ways of acting like children can however be very useful in learning
>>>>>a foreign language: talking without regard to whether the grammar is right;
>>>>>reading comic books; learning by talking to people rather than from drills.
>>
>>You're making a number of assertions.  Why should I believe you
>>rather than, say, the people who taught languages at my university?
>
>Are the people who were taught languages at your university, following 
>the drill-based methodology rather than the ways I recommend above,

You actually know very little about their methodology, because
I've told you very little.  I didn't, for instance, tell you it
was "rather than" the ways you recommended.  Moreover, I'm not
going to go into it further.

>able to speak fluently to monolingual native speakers of the languages they 
>learned? Can they understand colloquial speech, such as that found in films 
>and TV?

Sure, though some are presumably better than others.  BTW, I've told
you nothing at all about how *they* learned languages.

-- jd




