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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
by feralimal 6y ago
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!
- feralimal 6y agoI'm being downvoted for that?! Seriously, can you tell me a more useless way of spending your time??
- jobigoud 6y agoMany 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.
- feralimal 6y agoI 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.
- jobigoud 6y agoWhen 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.
- feralimal 6y agoYou 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...