Comment by _august | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _august | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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!

About 1/3 of English comes from Norman (“French”) or Latin roots.

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

It's a 5x5 grid.

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