Comment by cess11

Well, at least it's a good reason to re-read his infamous exchange with Derrida.

When I studied in Ulaan Bataar some twenty years ago I met a romanian professor of linguistics who had prepared by trying to learn mongolian from books. He quickly concluded that his knowledge of russian, cyrillic and having read his books didn't actually give him a leg up on the rest of us, and that pronounciation and rhythm as well as more subtle aspects of the language like humour and irony hadn't been appropriately transferred through the texts he'd read.

Rules might give you some grasp of a language, but breaking them with style and elegance without losing the audience is the sign of a true master and only possible by having a foundation in shared, embodied experience.

There's a crude joke in that Searle left academia disgraced the way he did.