What Coursera’s NLP course has taught me

I registered for Coursera’s NLP course in order to (among other reasons) get a little more informed about machine translation, but it turns out that the course — in its current incarnation — does not cover MT at all. So was this all in vain? While I cannot say I have gained much in-depth knowledge that I can apply, I can at least confidently say that I have gained a fairly clear idea of why so many things (including T9, autocorrect, and google search — but unfortunately not MT) do not work. So, while the course has not taught me anything about MT, it has been useful nonetheless. As the course draws to an end, I am grateful for professors Jurafsky and Manning from Stanford for putting this up.