
Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015) - colinprince
https://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/man-wins-french-scrabble-championship-without-speaking-a-word-of-french-1.3161884
======
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"...

~~~
k__
To make it more interesting, they could give out new official fantasy word
lists every year.

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_august
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 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.

~~~
busyant
Many years ago, I was at a party in grad school and I wound up playing
Scrabble with some classmates and some Chinese guy who could barely speak
English.

The Chinese guy destroyed us. He nickel-and-dimed us with esoteric 2 letter
words that we had never heard of and he strategically blocked us from the
double and triple-word score squares.

On the way home from the party, my classmates and I were complaining about how
the point of Scrabble was to show off your vocabulary and it was weird that we
would lose to someone who could barely speak the language.

My girlfriend/now-wife interrupted our kvetching with, "You're all upset
because someone else out-strategized you by understanding the rules better
than you did. Get over yourselves."

She was correct.

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braythwayt
The disconnect between "Scrabble the word game" and "Scrabble the area game
with a semi-arbitrary set of rules for tile placement that is somewhat related
to words" has been discussed here before.

But honestly, it isn't that exceptional a disconnect. Most board games have a
"theme" that increases our enjoyment. But many of them are actually math games
that could be played without thinking about the theme at all.

Chess is like that. Our knowledge of horses and bishops won't help us play
chess. Same with Acquire. Hotel chains don't behave anything like contiguous
tiles on a grid.

I'm about to order a copy of "Thunderbirds." The review I read said that it's
quite enjoyable, but if you aren't a fan of the show, the theme actually gets
in the way of enjoying the underlying game.

I feel like it may be more obvious when a Scrabble player wins a world
championship despite not speaking the language, but the disconnect between a
game as an abstract contest and a game's theme is very common.

~~~
oarabbus_
Is the point that any (board) game can be boiled down to the mathematical
backbone? Seems quite trivial.

~~~
braythwayt
All board games have something math-y underneath them. There is a thing called
Game Theory, after all.

But for some board games, the theme around the game aids our intuition about
how to play the game. In others, it serves only as window-dressing.

Take, for example, Settlers of Catan. We could change the theme somewhat, but
fundamentally a theme around resources helps players figure out what to do
with the cards. Saying that "ore helps you build buildings" also helps new
players understand and recall the rules.

It might be the exact same game if we got rid of the metaphor and just said
it's a game where you can exchange three grey cards, two yellow cards, and an
S token, for a C token, but that would make the game much harder to learn and
play.

At high levels of play perhaps you might spend all your time thinking about
card draw percentages and see the board as an abstract graph, but the theme
won't get in your way.

I'd say similar things about Agricola. Or the 18xx series of games. Those
themes really help most players learn and play the games.

Other games, not so much. Ticket to Ride would likely be just as easy to learn
and play if it was an abstract game of network connections. Go and Chess are
clearly long past their original themes. And so forth.

So getting back to your question, I'm trying to say something beyond "All
games have an abstract game underneath the theme." I'm trying to say that "A
large disconnect between a game's theme and its underlying abstract game is
not rare." I don't claim it's universal, but I suggest it's not so rare that
Scrabble stands alone as an oddity.

JM2C.

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doppp
"Scrabble isn't a word game. It's an area-control game with 150,000
definitions of legal placement for your resources."

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ape4
Elite 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/...](https://scrabblewordfinder.org/scrabble-words-with/q/and-
no/u)

~~~
boobsbr
I learned the word 'qanat' from Frank Herbert's Dune.

And I thought 'faqir' was written with a K.

~~~
schoen
The middle consonant is a ق, which is the same consonant at the end of "Iraq",
or Qur'an. There's been a tendency to write this with <q> in English more
recently -- consider "Qur'an" vs. "Koran". The <k> version produces
transliterations that may look more natural for English spelling, but there is
another Arabic letter, ك, which is transliterated as <k>, so the <q> version
helps distinguish the two.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
The borrowing of _fakir_ into English is largely the result of British
colonialism in India. While Persian (and the heavily Persianified variety
Urdu) was an important court language in NW India, and the word would have
been spelled with ق in the native script, the word had passed from Persian via
Urdu to Hindustani in general, which lacks a phoneme /q/, and so its unvoiced
velar stop is reflected as k in English spelling regardless.

------
ocfnash
I find this amusingly reminiscent of the Chinese Room:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room)

------
captn3m0
If you are interested in Scrabble, you'll like reading this (Feb 2019) review
of Scrabble covering it as a area-control-wargame:
[https://meeplelikeus.co.uk/scrabble-1948/](https://meeplelikeus.co.uk/scrabble-1948/)
. My favorite quote:

>‘This isn’t the game as you have been told it is played’, said Keel. ‘If you
play Scrabble this way, no-one else will ever want to play it with you. It’s
exhausting to look at a board in terms of positional vulnerability. Nobody
thinks you’re smart for exploiting the small, agile words in the Scrabble
dictionary. They think you’re a dick. This is not fun. We get something
different out of this. This is tactical. This is satisfying. Your letters
aren’t parts of words. They’re weapons and you need to employ them when you
can do the most damage.

------
yodsanklai
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.

~~~
majos
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...](https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/08/international-scrabble-the-
size-of-the-dictionary-depends-on-how-words-get-inflected.html)

[2] [http://testyourvocab.com/](http://testyourvocab.com/)

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mproud
That’s not uncommon. Highly competitive Scrabble is all about memorization.

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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.

------
orcul
The embodiment of Machine Learning.

~~~
meinstream
I would say it takes similar qualities to master chess and scrabble. I've been
to a scrabble tournament recently and it looks very similar to chess or go
kids tournaments. It all starts with memorizing an opening in chess or
specific sets of words like vowel words: [https://word.tips/vowel-
words/](https://word.tips/vowel-words/)

------
colinprince
More discussion on HN, 4 years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9927760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9927760)

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namanaggarwal
I think we have to give it to the human brain. It's not just about memorizing
but also finding patterns and then putting the right word there.

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thrower123
Are letter frequencies and scoring adjusted for Scrabble in different
languages?

~~~
lazyant
yes (sample of two)

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aj7
This is perfect on so many levels.

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close04
> Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French

> Nigel Richards of Christchurch, New Zealand, memorized French dictionary in
> nine weeks

It would appear that he speaks _all_ the words of French. He may not speak the
syntactically correct language but knowing all the words should take you a
long way to winning this competition.

Reading the title I assumed he only used neologisms and other words common
with foreign languages or something along those lines.

~~~
Scarblac
He knows what the words are and their spelling, but has no idea about their
meaning.

------
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.

~~~
izzydata
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.

~~~
gambiting
Yes, the Polish version of scrabble doesn't have the letter X at all(since
there are no Polish words which use it), and it has all of the Polish-specific
letters added, with the rarity based score recalculated for Polish - for
example Z is worth 1, since it's an extremely common letter in Polish:

[https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble#/media/Plik:Polskie_s...](https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble#/media/Plik:Polskie_scrabble_-
_paths_-_ready.svg)

