Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)
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Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)
#2One of my proudest foreign-language speaking moments was playing, and winning, a game of Codenames in France, against native french speakers.
It was an amazing way to learn new vocabulary. If you haven't played, it's a 4x4 grid of words with 2 teams guessing which words belong to which team, giving additional words as clues.
After the board setup, the French players would explain the single, double, sometimes triple meanings of the words and I'd write them down into a notebook. Then, using a English-French dictionary I'd come up with clues that could fit. It worked surprisingly well, I think perhaps given the similarities between many English and French words. I wonder how it would work with a much more different language.
Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)
#3Speculation: if you want to be a Scrabble master, you need to know N words, where N is much bigger than the vocabulary of a native speaker. So you're not at a big disadvantage compared to a native speaker.
Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)
#4One of my proudest foreign-language speaking moments was playing, and winning, a game of Codenames in France, against native french speakers. It was an amazing way to learn new vocabulary. If you haven't played, it's a 4x4 grid of words with 2 teams guessing which words belong to which team, giving additional words as clues. After the board setup, the French players would explain the single, double, sometimes triple…
Wouldn't have worked. For example in Chinese many double meanings come from the similarity in sound of words, something a dictionary would never be able to pick up. So youd be crippled trying to guess which words it relates to without knowing which words it has a false friend.
Despite that, your achievement is impressive. Nothing feels better than making a pun or beating a local in their own language!
Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)
#5One of my proudest foreign-language speaking moments was playing, and winning, a game of Codenames in France, against native french speakers. It was an amazing way to learn new vocabulary. If you haven't played, it's a 4x4 grid of words with 2 teams guessing which words belong to which team, giving additional words as clues. After the board setup, the French players would explain the single, double, sometimes triple…
About 1/3 of English comes from Norman (“French”) or Latin roots.
Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)
#6Speculation: if you want to be a Scrabble master, you need to know N words, where N is much bigger than the vocabulary of a native speaker. So you're not at a big disadvantage compared to a native speaker.
Yeah, but the native speaker already has k words.
This article [1] puts the number of distinct French root words (i.e., ignoring conjugation and other modifications) at around 65,000. This long-running online test [2] pegs the average English native speaker vocabulary size as maybe 25,000. So k might be at least N/3. That's not nothing!
Disclaimer: I know nothing about linguistics.
[1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/08/international-scrab...
Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)
#7One of my proudest foreign-language speaking moments was playing, and winning, a game of Codenames in France, against native french speakers. It was an amazing way to learn new vocabulary. If you haven't played, it's a 4x4 grid of words with 2 teams guessing which words belong to which team, giving additional words as clues. After the board setup, the French players would explain the single, double, sometimes triple…
It's a 5x5 grid.
Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)
#8Elite Scrabble players look at the language differently than speakers. For example you need to know
words with 'Q' but no 'U'. Not something that comes up in everyday speech.
https://scrabblewordfinder.org/scrabble-words-with/q/and-no/...
Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)
#9That’s not uncommon. Highly competitive Scrabble is all about memorization.
Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)
#10I find this amusingly reminiscent of the Chinese Room: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room