[steven]

Wow Mike, you have posted some interesting stuff. By the way, how in the hell did you know about "blue" being one of those colors in western/American culture? The "blue movie" thing you talked about made me think of the song called Peg, by Steely Dan-- there is a line that goes, "done up in blue print blue". I had to look up what that meant and that's how I found out what you're talking about. Maybe it's just me, but I was under the impression that a lot of people didn't know about that!

That Iphone thing looks like it might be neat-- I don't know much about iphones, but couldn't you use online dictionaries with it for the time being (like alc.co.jp)? (although you pointed out a pretty big weakness of online dictionaries!). I think things like iphones are fantastic-- all that data on such a small device is awesome. I always wished they'd come out with something like an ipad where i could store all my textbooks when I was in high school. Too bad it was like a decade late.

The word stress thing is huge too. From what I can tell that seems to be the most illusive part of English for ESL students. I've only met a handful of people who actually know how it works. I think there could possibly be a day when iphone-like dictionaries have audio clips and examples of these concepts (if they don't already!).

Something else about technology-- I just thought of this now, but what with youtube being able to... somewhat figure out what people are saying and transcribe it, there might be some really sweet data to come from it. Once that becomes more reliable and powerful it could prove to be a huge tool for linguistics. That might be 10-20 years down the road though.

I feel like I'm getting off topic, but I think if the technology that is available is taken advantage of we'll see some really cool new 'dictionaries' in the near future.