6 ms·

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

92 points by colinprince 7y ago

_august 7y ago
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.
- Arkhaine_kupo 7y ago
  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!
- zeroonetwothree 7y ago
  About 1/3 of English comes from Norman (“French”) or Latin roots.
- lukeholder 7y ago
  It's a 5x5 grid.
- fastball 7y ago
  I mean, it helps that half of your team was one of those native french speakers.
- busyant 7y ago
  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.
yodsanklai 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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-scrabble-the-size-of-the-dictionary-depends-on-how-words-get-inflected.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/08/international-scrab... [2] http://testyourvocab.com/ http://testyourvocab.com/
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  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.
ape4 7y ago
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/u https://scrabblewordfinder.org/scrabble-words-with/q/and-no/...
- yifanl 7y ago
  I could probably be convinced that not having any natural-preconceptions of the language actually leads to better performance in Scrabble: you're only concerned about knowing all the high-value words, and not the words you'd use in conversation, which presumably isn't at all related.
- dghughes 7y ago
  Their motives are qabalistic.
- boobsbr 7y ago
  I learned the word 'qanat' from Frank Herbert's Dune. And I thought 'faqir' was written with a K.
  - schoen 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
mproud 7y ago
That’s not uncommon. Highly competitive Scrabble is all about memorization.
ocfnash 7y ago
I find this amusingly reminiscent of the Chinese Room: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
aj7 7y ago
This is perfect on so many levels.
mFixman 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - mFixman 7y ago
    The board and (letter distribution × score) distribution are almost identical between languages. There are always a couple of letters with extremely high scores, and the winning tactic is to play ugly short words with those letters by the multipliers.
  - gambiting 7y ago
    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_scrabble_-_paths_-_ready.svg https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble#/media/Plik:Polskie_s...
- ImpressiveWebs 7y ago
  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.
colinprince 7y ago
More discussion on HN, 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9927760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9927760
namanaggarwal 7y ago
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.
justicezyx 7y ago
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.
nippoo 7y ago
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__ 7y ago
  To make it more interesting, they could give out new official fantasy word lists every year.
doppp 7y ago
"Scrabble isn't a word game. It's an area-control game with 150,000 definitions of legal placement for your resources."
braythwayt 7y ago
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_ 7y ago
  Is the point that any (board) game can be boiled down to the mathematical backbone? Seems quite trivial.
  - lbotos 7y ago
    I think the GP was more getting at "you can like the fluff" or you can "like the game". My ex could never understand why I would play wacky strategies when we'd play board games. It's because I wasn't "playing the game" I was trying to "break the game" by better understanding the meta. At high levels of strategy, you aren't even "playing the game" anymore.
  - braythwayt 7y ago
    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.
orcul 7y ago
The embodiment of Machine Learning.
- meinstream 7y ago
  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/
close04 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  He knows what the words are and their spelling, but has no idea about their meaning.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
captn3m0 7y ago
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.
thrower123 7y ago
Are letter frequencies and scoring adjusted for Scrabble in different languages?
- lazyant 7y ago
  yes (sample of two)

92 points by colinprince 7y ago

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.

Arkhaine_kupo 7y ago
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!
zeroonetwothree 7y ago
About 1/3 of English comes from Norman (“French”) or Latin roots.
lukeholder 7y ago
It's a 5x5 grid.
fastball 7y ago
I mean, it helps that half of your team was one of those native french speakers.
busyant 7y ago
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.

yodsanklai 7y ago

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 7y ago
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-scrabble-the-size-of-the-dictionary-depends-on-how-words-get-inflected.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/08/international-scrab... [2] http://testyourvocab.com/ http://testyourvocab.com/
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
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.

ape4 7y ago

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/u https://scrabblewordfinder.org/scrabble-words-with/q/and-no/...

yifanl 7y ago
I could probably be convinced that not having any natural-preconceptions of the language actually leads to better performance in Scrabble: you're only concerned about knowing all the high-value words, and not the words you'd use in conversation, which presumably isn't at all related.
dghughes 7y ago
Their motives are qabalistic.
boobsbr 7y ago
I learned the word 'qanat' from Frank Herbert's Dune. And I thought 'faqir' was written with a K.
- schoen 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.

mproud 7y ago

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

ocfnash 7y ago

I find this amusingly reminiscent of the Chinese Room: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

aj7 7y ago

This is perfect on so many levels.

mFixman 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
- mFixman 7y ago
  The board and (letter distribution × score) distribution are almost identical between languages. There are always a couple of letters with extremely high scores, and the winning tactic is to play ugly short words with those letters by the multipliers.
- gambiting 7y ago
  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_scrabble_-_paths_-_ready.svg https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble#/media/Plik:Polskie_s...
ImpressiveWebs 7y ago
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.

colinprince 7y ago

More discussion on HN, 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9927760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9927760

namanaggarwal 7y ago

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.

justicezyx 7y ago

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.

nippoo 7y ago

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__ 7y ago
To make it more interesting, they could give out new official fantasy word lists every year.

doppp 7y ago

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

braythwayt 7y ago

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_ 7y ago
Is the point that any (board) game can be boiled down to the mathematical backbone? Seems quite trivial.
- lbotos 7y ago
  I think the GP was more getting at "you can like the fluff" or you can "like the game". My ex could never understand why I would play wacky strategies when we'd play board games. It's because I wasn't "playing the game" I was trying to "break the game" by better understanding the meta. At high levels of strategy, you aren't even "playing the game" anymore.
- braythwayt 7y ago
  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.

orcul 7y ago

The embodiment of Machine Learning.

meinstream 7y ago
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/

close04 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
He knows what the words are and their spelling, but has no idea about their meaning.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

captn3m0 7y ago

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.

thrower123 7y ago

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

lazyant 7y ago
yes (sample of two)