Winner of French Scrabble Title Does Not Speak French (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Winner of French Scrabble Title Does Not Speak French (2015)

npr.org

184 pointshirundo127 comments

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"...

On Thais and Scrabble: https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/special-reports/1024881...

Honestly knowing just the spellings and not the meanings / useage contexts behind the words strikes me as an advantage since you’re as likely to weight “obscure” words as common words in your internal search algorithm. Knowing the language I feel must bias you.

Exactly what I was thinking. My brain works against me when I’m trying to recall obscure words that fit a pattern when making a limerick or whatnot.

> internal search algorithm

A cool thing you can do is memorize the words two ways, how it's spelled and also with the letters rearranged alphabetically. That way when you arrange your tiles alphabetically you can just see all the words you've memorized this way that you have or are close to.

Wouldn't that be an enormous timesink though? You basically have to memorize the dictionary... and then memorize it again but in a more complicated way.

Learning pairs (normal, alphabetical) doesn't take anything like twice as long as just learning the normal word. Our brain is funny with associating things, especially if there is some logic to it like always rearranging the characters in the first word alphabetically.

Getting to the top at almost any activity is a massive timesink. Lot to be said for not being too competitive.

I never heard of that before, cool idea.

At the highest levels, Scrabble is not a word game at all. It's a territory control game with 200,000 different valid ways to play resources.

Territory control? Either player can build off any word, so I don't think you can control any territory. You capture valuable squares before your opponent can when you have the opportunity, because unused squares are no man's land, and up for grabs.

Because Scrabble is turn based, any opportunities you create for yourself, you create for your opponent first. Making sure you don't make `valuable squares' available to your opponent is, arguably, more essential to winning than claiming them for yourself.

‘scorched earth’, wasting a valuable square on a low-scoring move, say (as an extreme example) by playing a blank tile on a triple-character square, just to deny the next player from using it, can also be a valuable tactic at times.

Many people don’t realize that, in competitive games, the goal isn’t to make a high score, it is to make a score that’s higher than that of your opponents.

Another game where many players dont realize that is Twister (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twister_(game) ). You shouldn’t play to make it easy for yourself to stay in play, you should play to make it easier for you than for your opponents to stay in play. In general, that means occupying circles close to your opponent, rather than those easily reachable by you. You should try to ‘lock’ your opponents in a corner of the playing area.

You control the 'territory' (squares) by using them, denying them to your opponent.

Areas right next to a played word are hard to capture, 2 parallel words would have to combine to form multiple 2 letter words, this create a natural buffer and you can corner off areas, block bonus tiles, offer easy point opportunities on away from the area you want to control to distract your opponent. A lot can be done with short words positioned well and can likely beat a more spelling knowledgeable person with positioning strategies.

I think of it as a territory control game even at low levels of play!

If one cares about score whatsoever, I'm not sure how one could play without paying a great deal of attention to gaining/denying access to the multiplier tiles.

How do you control (= lock the other player out of) territory?

Think more about not building long offshoots that will give your opponent lots of places to "hook onto" (or forcing them to do the same). Cleverly building and stacking words close and parallel to others rather than perpendicular, etc

https://www.meeplelikeus.co.uk/scrabble-1948/

Most hilarious read on why Scrabble should be played like a territory control war game

That's absolutely delightful, thanks for the read !

I love the Terry Pratchett reference too!

Memorizing an entire dictionary is kind of like the cases I've read about with persons whose native language isn't arabic, but have successfully memorized and can recite verbally the entire Quran.

In Indonesia it is more on learning on recognizing Arabic letters, write it and spell it. For Quran also learning the tajwid (تجويد). I want to say that it is not memorizing the entire dictionary. Off course it raises new problem, they can recite Quran but not understanding much the meaning unless they read the translation.

This true for many Jewish kids as well. We can read, and write in Hebrew but have no idea what it means without a translation.

True, but less so.

I've learned a couple alphabets, Hebrew among them, just for fun. I'm pretty confident I could learn to recite the Quran with a month of steady practice.

But memorize the whole thing? Like, name a sura, and I'm off to the races? That's very impressive.

And without any understanding of the underlying words! That's even more impressive, but my heart sinks a little at the waste of human potential which it represents.

Perhaps they're right, and they earn a lifetime in Paradise for their trouble. I can't help but thinking there are better ways to spend ones youth.

I mean, if they’re right it seems like a pretty good trade.

Just do it when you're old. More efficient that way.

Essentially Pascal's wager. Let's be honest, it's just dumb.

Couldn’t help but think about Jesus words when reading your comment about the waste of potential: “they are ever hearing, but never understanding”

I think in his case he was criticizing the scribes who memorized the scriptures, yet had no mercy for others.

It’s certainly an amazing feat of perseverance to memorize anything, but without understanding and transformation for good, it might as well be a million digits of pi.

What do you mean, how can you read Hebrew without nikudot unless you knew the words?

One can recognize the words without understanding their meaning

Well GP didn't specify "without nikkud". Most modern prayerbooks and bibles come with nikkud. Being able to read without nikkud does often require familiarity with the words but there are a limited number of constructions in Hebrew, especially when you remove loanwords in modern Hebrew (presumably GP was referring to religious literature, which doesn't include aberrations such as ווידאו (video) or אמברקס ("ambreks" - a vehicle handbrake)). It's not 100% phonetic but it's a whole lot easier than English, so while a you might mispronounce unfamiliar words you will be able to guess correctly quite a bit, or at least be close.

> We can read, and write in Hebrew but have no idea what it means

I don't think that matches the definition of "can read" of most people. Maybe you can pronounce Hebrew, but "being able to read a given lamguage" implies some level of understanding.

Sorry you feel that way.

So how would you describe the ability to open a Hebrew bible/prayerbook and recite recite verses or liturgy that you have never seen before and don't have memorized? I think that's "reading", albeit without comprehension. This is common among religious folk.

Note: most religious schools I know of do try to teach the kids to understand what they're reading as well, but that's a more advanced phase - first the kids learn to read Hebrew, which is the bare minimum requirement to be a functioning member of religious society, and then they're taught to understand what they're reading.

My experience was that some kids learned enough to translate a passage of average difficulty by high school, while others never quite got past the very basic vocabulary. But no one in my school got past second grade without being able to read and transcribe a text. (This was at a religious day school in the US).

Yeah, this lack of knowledge in what exactly we're reading (except for a few oft-occurring words here and there) can be seen in the inability to read, say, an Arabic newspaper. Written Arabic heavily omits the equivalent of vowels in Arabic (fathah, kasra, lamma, sukoon) since those can be figured out with context.

So, even if I can fluently read the Quraan, I wouldn't be able to figure out the right way to read a simple poster.

I don’t think speaking Arabic natively would make that much of a difference. Quranic Arabic is roughly as close to the various Arabic “dialects” as Latin is to the Romance languages. I’d new very impressed with someone who spoke Italian memorizing the Aeneid and figuring out what was going on purely from that.

Any native speaker of an Arabic dialect (except for perhaps some really peripheral countries like Mauritania or Chad) brought up on television is going to know some Modern Standard Arabic, because it is used in newsreading and other posh broadcasting. MSA is not identical with Quranic Arabic, but it is conservative and close enough that Arabic speakers will understand the older Quranic language based on their understanding of MSA. Of course, Arabic speakers will still misunderstand things here and there from the Quran (just like native English speakers sometimes misunderstand a word or expression used in the King James Bible), but they will understand most of it.

What about a native maltese speakers?

Wikipedia says:

> A 2016 study shows that, in terms of basic everyday language, speakers of Maltese are able to understand around a third of what is said to them in Tunisian Arabic, which is a Maghrebi Arabic related to Siculo-Arabic, whereas speakers of Tunisian Arabic are able to understand about 40% of what is said to them in Maltese. This reported level of asymmetric intelligibility is considerably lower than the mutual intelligibility found between other varieties of Arabic.

Arabic-origin words make up a minority of Maltese vocabulary, and I assume Maltese speakers are much more likely to watch English or Italian television than MSA, and most don't have Quranic education.

> Arabic-origin words make up a minority of Maltese vocabulary.

What would the rest of the vocabulary be based on?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_language#Vocabulary : "The historical source of modern Maltese vocabulary is 52% Italian/Sicilian, 32% Siculo-Arabic, and 6% English, with some of the remainder being French"

AFAIK the most common words are more likely to be of Arabic origin, though.

Sorry for the late answer, but thanks!

This doesn't take into account that the vast majority of Arabs are Muslim and learn the intricacies of Quran and Quranic Arabic as kids, so they will understand it quite well.

Speaking Arabic natively makes a huge difference in that the resources for understanding Quran are all available to you easily, both linguistically and culturally.

Or foreign song lyrics. During the international “Celtic music” fad of the 1990s – when bands like Clannad, Altan and Capercaillie were briefly much bigger outside their native countries than within them – I listened to a lot of these songs and memorized the Irish- or Scottish Gaelic-language lyrics just through pure exposure. In spite of not actually speaking Irish/Scottish Gaelic (I know just a handful of isolated words), I could reproduce those lyrics now with probably a high degree of fidelity.

Back when I worked in sales, there was a guy on my sales team that would have the entire Norwegian Top 40 billboard memorized since its inception in the 50's, complete with producers and writers of lyrics. While a bit socially awkward, he still did alright at sales by following the script. So by that token he was regarded by my collegues as a bit of a savant.

"Lest you suspect," also makes for quite unusual language in the article, btw. Haven't seen that in many modern news articles, at least. But strangely this rather archaic phrase seems to be more common in modern American litterature than in British literature. Together with the verbal addition of "I would think" at the end of that quote in the start, the article takes on a rather rustic feel.

> But strangely this rather archaic phrase seems to be more common in modern American litterature than in British literature.

There is an interesting phenomenon I've read about where distant colonies, kept isolated from where their language originated, end up sounding more archaic than their home territory. The act of crossing an ocean can serve as a linguistic time capsule and changes made in the homeland don't always propagate.

I've heard this claimed about a few languages:

* Quebec French vs. France. (true to the form of TFA I do not speak French, so I cannot assess this claim.)

* Judaeo-Spanish spoken by expelled Jewish communities vs. Spain. (from what I recall of recordings of the former it did seem like it lacks some phonetic changes that Spain had around the 15th-16th centuries, like [ʒ] and [ʃ] moving to [x], loss of initial /f/ in words like hijo, hablar ... and consequently generally has this almost Portuguese-sounding feel to it. Interestingly these same phonetic changes made it across to Latin American colonies but not to expelled Spanish Jews in Europe)

* American English vs. England. (I've heard this claimed variously, as if to say that Shakespeare spoke with one of today's American accents, and frankly that sounds kind of dubious. But there may be bits and pieces of American English that sound old fashioned across the pond.)

> as if to say that Shakespeare spoke with one of today's American accents, and frankly that sounds kind of dubious

To suggest that Shakespeare spoke with an American accent would be silly, but it is true that the non-rhotic "r" didn't become widespread until after Shakespeare's time, starting as a marker of prestige among the British upper classes in the mid-1700s (and spreading to the wannabe-aristocracy in the colonies, hence the stereotypical accent of the American Southern plantation owner). If the pronunciation of words like "car" is how one distinguishes British from American, then I suppose yes, Shakespeare would sound a bit less British than you might expect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English

Sure, but for non rhotic accents you have outliers in the States such as New York or Boston or parts of the South.

There are youtube videos of attempted reconstructed Shakespearean accents. To my (american) ear it kind of sounds more like rhotic England.

To complicate things a little, the non-rhotic accents of the eastern seaboard of North America aren't generally considered posh: Southie, Mainer, Brooklyn. Newfoundland is the region of North American longest settled by English speakers, I believe. Google "Newfie accent" to hear true Shakespearean English.

Newfanese is pretty much crystallized Hiberno-English, at least if we're talking the language of the bay wops rather than townies. It has a surprising amount of commonality with African-American vernacular, likely due to transportation and indenture (which is why AAVE, while distinct, barely edges into typical creole patterns).

The English of Shakespeare's time, or at least of his plays, has been largely reconstructed by linguist David Crystal, whose son, the actor and director Ben Crystal, is probably the best-known practitioner. There are a number of videos on YouTube of Ben doing Shakespeare in OP. A good starting point is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s - and if one had to tie it closely to a modern regional variant, it would be West Country. But that would just be something it would remind you of rather than a template.

It was a joke.

I have another great example of this: Dutch versus South African. These were the same language and used the same dictionary and spelling rules as recent as 150 years ago. And now, while many words look similar, many words are different (and words for modern inventions are completely different in both languages).

This results in that when I met a group of south african ppl living in The Netherlands some time ago, we would speak English, because our native languages drifted so much apart.

I think the time of divergence in spoken language is much longer than that, maybe 300 years (and with lots of second-language speakers, which speeds it up). And starting I believe from dialects closer to Flemish.

The formal written language was indeed standard Dutch, but was not widely understood. For example (IIRC) around 1900 the dutch reformed church in the Cape partly switched to English, on the grounds that at least this was a real European language, in which people might actually understand the sermon! After that Afrikaans got formalised, e.g. the first official bible translation was 1933.

> * Quebec French vs. France. (true to the form of TFA I do not speak French, so I cannot assess this claim.)

For those who want to research that further:

1) France French uses slang based on puns, like mec (dude):

https://www.thoughtco.com/un-mec-vocabulary-1372268

2) Quebec has more English loan words because of proximity to Ontario and USA.

One claim I read was that Quebecois profanity was often religious in nature, and this is not the case in France.

Also: Polish spoken in Poland vs the one by Poles in Siberia. About a million was exiled by Soviets to Siberia alone, not counting other remote parts of Soviet Union.

Also: Czech spoken by settlers in Romanian Banat, where a few thousand Czechs moved in the 1800s. Delightfully old-timey.

Interestingly, the people there are much more religious than contemporary Czechs, who are mostly atheist. As if they lived in a time capsule.

Some of the English words and phrases used in India for official use or even by some old people have either disappeared or decreased in usage in the UK and it has been only 70 years.

I would love to read some examples of this please!

"Do the needful at the earliest" is the poster-child, but I'm struggling to find a great list to link.

The effective divergence time is much longer than since 1947 -- I believe that around 1900 people in England thought their cousins in India a generation behind in dress & everyday speech. And formal bureaucratic terms were already ossified, another classic is "out of station" (as in, out of town, away from the office) which IIRC is from east-india company days.

Few words/phrases I can think of

- Hill station (Hill town)

- Out of station (Out of town - other commenter mentioned this too)

- Tiffin (breakfast food or snack)

- Supper (for dinner)

- redress (resolve)

- revert (respond)

- Ta ta (Bye)

- Yours faithfully/respectfully when signing off letters

- Sir/Madam (widely used for elders and people of higher status or generally to everyone as a way of respect)

- Mentioning Honourable etc. before names of judges, bureaucrats etc.

I’m sure there are plenty more but can’t immediately recall. If I read an official letter from a government agency, I could quote more.

This is interesting! Take Norwegian for instance, which is originally of West Norse origin. During the viking age, settlers (many of whom were outlaws in Norway lol) sailed to the then newly discovered Iceland. These people all spoke West Norse, which was the language spoken in Norway at the time. The settlers in Iceland largely kept the West Norse language through the centuries, while mainland Norwegian was more and more influenced by their East Norse neighbours of Sweden and Denmark. So today, Icelandic and Norwegian are just about as different as Norwegian and German. While Norwegians will recognize a few words from Icelandic, most of it remains mutually unintelligible. Meanwhile, Icelandic people can readily understand the historic and archaic Old Norse texts without much translation—or certainly far more easily than a Norwegian would—where a Norwegian would struggle to understand most of it today.

> Meanwhile, Icelandic people can readily understand the historic and archaic Old Norse texts without much translation—or certainly far more easily than a Norwegian would—where a Norwegian would struggle to understand most of it today.

This is not actually due to Icelandic being as conservative as you think. It is due to Icelandic intellectuals in the 19th century successfully pushing for the restoration of many old words that had gone out of use in the intervening centuries. Before the 19th-century language movement, Icelandic had lost a lot of that old vocabulary and had replaced them with borrowings from Danish.

> This is not actually due to Icelandic being as conservative as you think.

Many would say that is exactly proof of their conservationist nature! While there is some truth to your claim of the language not evolving in a fully dynamic or "natural" fashion (i.e. rather evolving with input from culturally conservative experts and intellectuals, which is how literally all Nordic languages evolve today as far as they're able to control it), Icelandic hadn't really lost that much of the original Norse, and certainly not as much as Norwegian did in the same amount of time.

This is due mainly to a few factors. First of all, Norway became "danified" much quicker because the Black Death wiped out most of our nobility, leading Danish to become much more prominent much quicker over here. As such, Iceland had more of a choice in the matter. Second, Norway is in very close proximity to both Sweden and Denmark, leading to constant influence due to trade and even families migrating back and forth. On the other hand, it takes much more effort to get to Iceland, since you need to undertake a pretty long journey over the ocean to reach it.

Like Norway, who was also under Danish rule, Iceland also went into a phase of revival and romanticism around the Napoleonic wars, leading both peoples to search for their roots. In Norway this struggle lead to the invention of Nynorsk (New Norwegian), which uses a lot of older dialect words—especially from West Norwegian dialects—compared to the almost completely Danish Bokmål (Book Language). These two written languages are still pretty similar, though, and thus pretty much unintelligible with Old Norse.

Additionally, if you listen to Faroese, you'll find that it is also much closer to Old Norse than both Danish and Norwegain, despite the language arguably being much longer under Danish influence than both Norwegian and Icelandic.

> Icelandic hadn't really lost that much of the original Norse.

I would say that it did. Besides that loss of vocabulary which I mentioned, the phonological system of Icelandic has drastically shifted since the Old Norse era. Yes, on paper the language might seem conservative, but that is just the result of a conservative orthography. The actual sound of the Icelandic (and Faroese) language today bears little resemblance to Old Norse.

The one big archaism modern Icelandic has going for it is its morphology, but this shouldn’t get more hype than it deserves.

Except Icelandic people can read Old Norse, and that's all the hype you need. It's a bit more difficult for Faroese. It's even more difficult for Norwegians and Danes who will only be able to pick out a word or two. That's the continuum. Equally, a Norwegian can read Danish, but it takes from one beer to a wedding reception to get used to their strange laryngeal pronounciation, at which point the Norwegian probably is so drunk that he speaks perfect Danish. That's hardly drastic, although it might look like it is on paper. What's drastic is the day after. (Swedes don't count, and Norwegians are more than happy to explain it to them... in their own language.) Skål!

> Except Icelandic people can read Old Norse, and that's all the hype you need.

Yes, but again, that is due to 1) the 19th-century language reform, and 2) a conservative orthography where the spelling remains the same even though modern Icelandic pronunciation is nothing like Old Norse.

When it comes to languages being conservative or innovative, linguists examine the language itself over time, not just the present literary standard or the orthography used to write the language. So, yes, Icelandic has converged back towards Old Norse in certain ways due to artificial 19th-century efforts, but in the intervening centuries there were such massive innovations that praising Icelandic as conservative is disingenuous. Linguists tire of having to explain this (and some similar cases like Romanian versus the rest of Romance) to laymen.

And Danish pronounciation is nothing like Norwegian. What's your point? It's still two very similar languages, with almost the same heritage, except for pronounciation. Are you even Scandinavian? Because you're plainly mistaken in that Icelandic is "nothing like Norse." Even such a statement is wholly preposterous as it's clearly related and evolved from it! Danish is also "nothing like" the Danish before laryngealization, but its genealogy is unquestionable. Norwegian has changed even from the 30's and to the 60's, and from the 60's and to the 2000's, but—guess what—it's still Norwegian! Where would you draw the line? You'll find similar changes for the English language as well, that becomes apparent simply by listening to old news reels. It's an audible constant. Further more, the Icelandic language has changed, evolved and reformed several times through-out history, and not just in the 19th century. Another big shift was during the 16th century, for example. So your claim that policy is unnatural is about as logical as claiming that there was no rule in Europe during the Middle Ages. Obviously there was. And they also protected and ruled their languages as a matter of national security. Thus it can be argued that while some parts of the language will evolve naturally and dynamically as a constant, there are always forces at play who will attempt to control it in order to gain national cohesion. Another great example is French, where most dialects have been eradicated. And this is a constant whether linguists find proof of it or not. So it's spesifically not disingenuous to praise Icelandic as conservative. It is in fact disingenuous to do the opposite. Not doing so is in actually rather disrespectful to the proud Icelandic people, who's been so great at conserving their language and national heritage, while others have not. This is of course made more easy because the language is insular and remote, but it's an achievement none the less. Thus your argumentum ad verecundiam has no power here, because only Erasmus Montanus would argue otherwise. But then I suspect a large part of these so-called academics want nothing more than to disintegrate nations entirely, because a large part of the relativist marxist do indeed come from linguistics. For that reason alone it should be obvious that language is highly political. In fact some might say that the rather small differenceses between East Norse and West Norse prove it. Many of the differences between Nordic languages are far more due to political differences and interest groups rather than for purely lingiuistical reasons. Through many times in history it has of course been of national importance to emphasise such differences, especially with the power struggles between the Nordic countries, for instance around romantic revival surrounding the Napoleonic wars.

What I like about "lest" is that it demonstrates that the present subjunctive as a grammatical category is not quite dead yet in English. A native speaker of English knows that "lest it seem" is right and "lest it seems" is wrong, generally without ever having been taught this or knowing what to call this distinction.

The so-called past subjunctive is more easily found, though it's losing its distinctive form (there's only one). People say "if I was" instead of "if I am" when they're describing a present contrary-to-fact state -- "If I was rich, I'd buy a Tesla". You can see that this is a past subjunctive, not a simple past, because it isn't past at all but present and contrary to fact.

So English still retains the subjunctive! Yay!

As an American, I'd say "If I were rich" rather than "If I was rich."

Though in the Southern accents I've been around for much of my life, "If I was" was more common.

Perhaps it's because I'm old, or because I'm Canadian, but I would expect "if I were".

That's the single distinctive past subjunctive form I alluded to. I say "if I were rich" myself, but I'm used to hearing the other.

I wonder if that give him any advantage learning actual French or if this so different area of the brain that actually doesn’t matter.

He memorized the French scrabble dictionary, so I doubt it’s in any way useful. He doesn’t know the meaning of any of the terms.

His brain is now wired with the space of possible spellings and phonemes. That can't have a nonzero impact on learning. He might have a jump on pattern recognition for conjugation, for instance.

I don’t think it’s allowed to conjugate verbs in Scrabble.

I don't think that's true, though I am not a player (only played very casually as a kid w/ my grand parents): https://www.fisf.net/scrabble/decouverte-du-scrabble/r%C3%A8... (French, sorry)

I don't know how usable French conjugates are in scrabble, though. Intuitively, it should help placing high score letters like z, which is otherwise uncommon in French.

Conjugates are super easy to use. Every verb can generate 50 different words, mostly with subtle variations in ending -e -es -ez -ent / -ai -ais -ait -aient.

Playing a verb immediately allows the opponent to play an extension on it and make more points than you. This is a total game changer. I honestly think scrabble in French is a different game as in English. I'd rather see an article explaining the rules of the championship and how French scrabble is alien to what people think of scrabble.

You can definitely use conjugated verbs: "All words labeled as a part of speech (including those listed of foreign origin, and as archaic, obsolete, colloquial, slang, etc.) are permitted with the exception of the following: words always capitalized, abbreviations, prefixes and suffixes standing alone, words requiring a hyphen or an apostrophe" https://scrabble.hasbro.com/en-us/rules

Ah, ok, in Russia in scrabble-like games (Scrabble itself is not very popular) subjugation and declension usually aren’t allowed.

Same in Dutch, I assume because of the possibility of just adding an "e" or a "t" to most words to score its points again.

Nice I love these sort of language differences. In English of course you can add an "s" to many words to make them plural, and that is permitted in Scrabble.

Learning french is an awful lot of grammar and rules, weird pronunciation tricks.

I’d assume it would take 3 or 4 times more effort than straight learning the official Scrabble dictionary, if that’s the only goal.

Indeed memory, the point where computers totally outsmart us all. That's why traditional school where you get to the next grade by showing off your memory is totally deprecated.

It might be me, but these kind of contests and our excitement about it only shows our stupidity even more. Our specialty is very fortunately not memory, it should never be. We are incredibly special creatures with much more interesting capabilities.

Machines can also throw javelins and shots farther than any human can ever hope to. Hydraulics can trivially lift more than any strong man. A large enough spring can outperform any long jumper. More directly relatable, chess engines have been outperforming the grand masters for a decade now.

That a machine can outperform a human doesn't make a human doing it unimpressive. The excitement and fun of the competition remains.

But games like Scrabble seem even more pointless than the Spelling bee which is in itself pointless ( making a competition out of memorizing or constructing from memory similar rooted words that one would barely use in any but the most scholarly of arcane academia or in the practice of law, is anything but useful or worthy of one's time ).

A more worthwhile competition would test the participants on their reasoning / logic and turn it into an engaging game. Even gamifying brevity of language is a worthwhile pursuit since so many of todays youth speak so poorly or struggle expressing their thoughts in a coherent and curt manner.

Scrabble and Spelling Bee encourage rote learning and little beyond that. A terrible waste of potential like OP alluded to. Memorizing and parroting, needless to say, is just not a very good use of the human intellect. Its really bad form and speak to the vanity and vainness of the organizers and contestants to have these silly competitions in this day and age.

I've always been embarrassed that spelling bees are a thing in English. It's interesting that you can see the etymology of a word in its spelling, but horrific spelling sure is a barrier to literacy. How do you pronounce "lough"? How about "rough" or "dough"? And "plough"? Now try "hiccough".

I envy Finnish kids. They've already mastered the grammar and are well on their way with the vocabulary. Spelling is barely a speed bump. English speakers have national competitions to demonstrate that they've mastered spelling.

Nit-pick: it's already more than 2 decades since Kasparov lost to deep blue (1997). Time flies.

Scrabble is largely a game of area-based combinatorics, which rewards finding sequences of letters that happen to be words and fit into the board's multiplier spaces. Memorizing the two-letter word list is extraordinarily helpful when playing competitively because it allows for playing a tighter game that doesn't resemble words commonly used in English.

Makes me wonder if he could have won while knowing only a fraction of the French dictionary.

If you're interested in watching competitive Scrabble, the NASPA YouTube channel recently did a virtual Tournament of Champions: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhvDB0pE-3ptFJBqemMOh...

I would find a scrabble tournament a lot more interesting if it limited it to the top 10k most common english words.

Similarly, a lot of Chinese students do surprisingly well in the verbal section of US admissions exams like the SAT and GRE, despite being non-native speakers. They just memorize long lists of obscure English words that would rarely ever be used in practice.

Not sure if this is a good comparison. For SAT, GRE you need to know a word innately, be able to use it in a proper context, understand homonyms, distinguish between similar words and know which one to use in the given prompt etc.

Yes, this does involve remembering long lists of words, but there is a lot of context and I would consider this proper language learning. It is vastly different from the memorization referred to in the article.

From my experience as an English language student (non-native), I disagree to some extent. Taking (and learning) the SAT is quite a different experience than learning the language. It seems that people who are good at "taking tests" excel at it and this does not correlate completely with their ability to use the language. Of course often they ALSO learn the language (by other means), but I know people who successfully took the SAT in order to participate in student exchange programs and when they go to the USA they realize that they are quite poor at English and tend to stick to ethnic communities, because they are not comfortable to use the language at a higher level.

On the other hand, if you study for the SAT when you already know the language, it seems to indeed improve your English a lot.

Ok, my experience is with GRE, and my assumption was that SAT would be something similar. For GRE, to get a good score (85+ percentile) you need to score really well in the comprehension section, which has a significant weightage. It requires considerable command over English vocabulary, its idiomatic usage, and of course along with other things like logical thinking, keen observation etc. Merely remembering word lists without understanding its contextual usage would only get you so far. Definitely not the kind of success exhibited in the article.

I think being good at test taking correlates with perfectionism. The ones who test well but then stick to speakers of their native language may simply be perfectionists who are horrified at being seen as stupid when their English isn't perfect.

As far as I can attest (I studied together with them), this is not the case :)

I have seen people memorizing these rare words before SAT. They passed the test but the whole exercise still appeared useless. They were not to start using these words, they just memorized them and we're conscious about not using them.

It was not proper language learning at all, that one looks completely differently.

I’m a native English speaker that took the GRE with only limited time to study. I picked up some practice tests and quickly decided to use 100% of my study time to learn vocabulary which seemed to be recommended to bump up the language sections. I learned words in context but only in a way to write a word in one context and understand a word in 1-2 contexts. I made a 20 minute “podcast” of the 200 or so new-to-me words and listened to it on repeat. The singular word I can actively recall 10 years later is “ennui” because it resonated at the time and to this day. I can probably passively recall 50 of the words.

Anyway all that is to say I felt my study was a bit more on the memorization side and agree with assertions that the GRE checks test-taking abilities more than capability.

The math parts are a joke as one can reverse-check answers a, b, c, d In a fraction of a time It takes to actually solve the question.

Grammar parts are also a joke as native speakers can intuit “a is to b as x is to y” problems easily, but non native speakers can easily miss some nuance or second meaning. But in daily life, this linguistic problem rarely occurs without a lot of extra context or body language.

Bad test overall.

The Wikipedia page of this fellow:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards_(Scrabble_playe...

Two documentaries about word games came out at similar times. “Word Wars” (2004) was about Scrabble and “Wordplay” (2006) was about crosswords. Both are excellent films about high-level play in these games.

After watching them, what struck me was that the best Scrabble players were all, shall I say, a bit weirder than the best crossword players.

Crossword requires a large general fund of knowledge. Scrabble only requires rote memorization. Crossword attracted well-rounded people. Top Scrabblers were monomaniacs.

(2015)

Thank you. I was just telling my friend about this and she insisted this happens every few years. That didn’t seem likely, and your comment helped us figure out that we’d actually talked about this years ago :)

Well, per this same winner's Wikipedia page, he's won several times since 2015, so it may indeed be that you've discussed it multiple times for separate events.

It's likely you guys talked about it twice.

"He competed in the French Championship and won his second Classique Championship" (2018)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards_(Scrabble_playe...

There was even a brief HN comment thread about it 2 years ago.

"Fun fact: the current top player of French scrabble is from New Zealand and doesn’t speak a word of French. He just memorized all ~200k valid words in the OSD."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18689565

I’m getting to the age where that seems to happen often.

On the positive side, I think I have figured out a sequence of all my favorite tv series in a loop that should last me for the rest of my life.

You can play Scrabble without knowing how to speak the language, or what the grammar is, or what any of the words mean; you only need to know how to spell the words of that language (or least the ones which are permitted in Scrabble).

IIRC this person was interviewed for "Ultra learning," which reminds me I need to read that book still.

Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career by Scott Young

https://www.amazon.com/Ultralearning-Master-Outsmart-Competi...

Is this Duplicate Scrabble (all contestants playing the same letters)? If so, I imagine computers reached perfect play long ago, as it seems to involve nothing beyond memorizing huge lists of numbers and searching the board for the best place to put them.

But what about regular Scrabble? Sometimes, the best play is not the word that's worth the most points, because it might give your opponent a chance to make a big play (the simplest example is refraining to play a high-value word that opens a triple score square for your opponent). The best play depends on the probabilities of your opponent holding, now or in the future, certain letters, and you can make a probabilistic model of that based on the letters that are in play at any moment. Perfect play seems to involve a lot of computation. What's the state of the art on this?

What Scrabble degenerates into.

Many enjoyable games become quite a bit different when they’re played at a high level. Whether or not the game is still enjoyable at that point is not always easy to say. I definitely would not enjoy memorizing lists of words in order to be more competitive.

This makes sense when you realize Scrabble isn't a word game, it is a board control game.

Analogous to this:

GPT-3 doesn't speak English.

From 2015..

In 2015..

Imagine memorising the best part of 200,000 words in a foreign language in order to win a game of scrabble! And not being able to string a sentence together in that language!

Some people have waaaaayyyy too much time on their hands!

I'm being downvoted for that?! Seriously, can you tell me a more useless way of spending your time??

Arguing on HN about downvotes (I've done it too!) ;o)

Yeah - why bother? :)

I don't even know how people can downvote. I only get the upvote option.

It's site karma, ie balance of votes. When you have enough upvotes you get downvotes.

Thanks for the explanation. It also goes some way to explaining the strong consensus of opinion around here!

Many sports & activities feel like this at high level. An athlete will train everyday and build muscle memory in order to jump over a bar placed as high as possible. A chess player, a football player, etc. Highly specialized skills that are of no use in day to day life. The collateral benefits like fitness or entertainment value can also be found here.

I can understand the value of sports, and of doing anything at a high level. Mastery of anything is its own reward. I get that. But what these Thai champs are doing seems crazy.

Imagine, as an English speaker, waking up wanting to win the Hungarian scrabble tournament. No, you don't want to know how to speak Hungarian. You only want to win the Hungarian scrabble tournaments. And you're prepared to invest months of your life memorising sequences of letters to do it!

Its insane.

When you do something competitively it decouples the activity from the original use. Just like a Pole vault champion is not really interested in being able to reach the second floor with a stick.

In this sense the fact that the words have to match the Hungarian dictionary feels arbitrary. But it's a bit like the rules for triple jump where you have to land the first jump on the same foot, or the rules of high jump that prevent you from taking off with two feet at the same time, these rules feel arbitrary in the context of the original utility of the skill.

You like to argue huh? :)

Triple jump is valuable in itself - you train your body, and that has consequent benefits. Learning strings of consecutive characters characters perhaps has a memory benefit. But then, why not train your memory to get that benefit AND get a consequent benefit at the same time. Eg card counting to make money at casinos? Or actually learn English, so this becomes a vocab extension exercise? But all that effort to win....? At scrabble?!? The mind boggles.

And anyway, if you were that good, no-one would want to play scrabble with you at Christmas...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com