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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)

#11

Post by fastball »

_august wrote: post #2

One 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…

I mean, it helps that half of your team was one of those native french speakers.

Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)

#12

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

yodsanklai wrote: post #3

Speculation: 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.

But I'm assuming for French Scrabble that you're allowed to use any conjugated form of a verb, for example, or the masculine/feminine/plural forms of nouns and adjectives. Memorizing all these forms individually seems like a nightmare (as a French learner I know...) where a native speaker would have a much better sense for the rules that dictate ending changes, even for the large amount of irregular verbs.

Also, memorizing all the different accented letters seems like it would be super difficult for an English speaker, but again not sure how French Scrabble treats accents.

Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)

#14

Post by mFixman »

IMO this is because Scrabble is a terrible game. Knowledge of the breadth of your language will only get you so far in the game: the winner will be the person who can put the greatest amount of short words with 'X' and 'Z' in triple-word panels.

If I were to re-invent the game I would remove the triple tiles and half the point value from most letters. This way you can give advantage to people who put longer and nicer words instead of that guy who knows that "qi" and "hext" are words in modern English dictionaries.

Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)

#17

Post by izzydata »

mFixman wrote: post #14

IMO this is because Scrabble is a terrible game. Knowledge of the breadth of your language will only get you so far in the game: the winner will be the person who can put the greatest amount of short words with 'X' and 'Z' in triple-word panels. If I were to re-invent the game I would remove the triple tiles and half the point value from most letters. This way you can give advantage to people who put longer and nicer…

Does the game in other languages assign the same point values to letters? Is the distribution of letters the same?

It seems like a different language would have more or less frequencies of any particular letter which should influence the amount of available tiles and what they are worth.

Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)

#18

Post by justicezyx »

Learned this in the book Ultra learning. In short, the game does not have much to do with the language understanding anyway. They only overlap in that you do need to memorize certain words. But the brain behavior process are then largely different between understanding the language and playing the scramble game.

Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)

#19

Post by nippoo »

I was at the World Scrabble Championships in Prague a few years ago (with Nigel Richards). The amazing thing was how many of the highest-level Scrabble players were Thai and spoke barely any English. There are about 200,000 words in the Scrabble dictionary and and an average English speaker only knows 40,000. So knowing the language doesn't give a huge advantage, and all competitors end up spending years memorising word lists with no definitions - at a high level it's basically just a combinatorics game.

The majority of the English-speaking competitors were mathematicians / scientists, rather than linguists for similar reasons.

This sometimes has amusing repercussions - the world no 2 at the time, who was Thai, played the word "hetairas" and then challenged the word "twigs"...

Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)

#20

Post by ImpressiveWebs »

mFixman wrote: post #14

IMO this is because Scrabble is a terrible game. Knowledge of the breadth of your language will only get you so far in the game: the winner will be the person who can put the greatest amount of short words with 'X' and 'Z' in triple-word panels. If I were to re-invent the game I would remove the triple tiles and half the point value from most letters. This way you can give advantage to people who put longer and nicer…

No, this is not true. All professional scrabble players know the short words. None of them has an advantage because of that. The advantage is knowing the “bingos” (ie the 7 and 8 letter words). Players like Nigel Richards will also know the 6-letter words, which are much less useful, but which not all pros will know.

There’s a lot to pro scrabble (I know because I’ve played many of the best players in the world online), but knowing the small words is not what puts people over the top.

Now, if you’re just talking about casual games, then yeah, knowing the short X, Z, and Q words is going to give you a huge edge. But that has nothing to do with why a non French player won using the French dictionary.

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