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Where did you pull that number from? The ODS which is the official French Scrabble dictionary has something like 300,000 words. In 9 weeks that's averaging mem

Where did you pull that number from? The ODS which is the official French Scrabble dictionary has something like 300,000 words. In 9 weeks that's averaging memorizing several THOUSAND words PER DAY. And don't give me BULL like "well plurality S/ES means a lot less" - yeah. NO. He still has to remember which words take what kind of plurality. And if you watch ANY interviews with him, you can tell he doesn't really take any shortcuts - he just straight-up memorizes them as a series of playable "tokens". I'm all for the "indomitable human spirit" but you could practice 24/7 and you'd still be SCRABBLING at base camp while Nigel Richards summitted Everest without the aid of supplemental oxygen. https://github.com/Thecoolsim/French-Scrabble-ODS8 https://github.com/Thecoolsim/French-Scrabble-ODS8

wongarsu 2y ago
Scrolled to a random position in the file, and there's 37 lines of all declinations of the word "monologue". Followed by a bunch of nouns with just two to four forms, followed by 47 declinations of the word "monopolise". What he did is no small feat. You still have to memorize which suffixes are possible in which verbs (there are rules he would pick up on, but there are exceptions to the rules). But it is made easier by French verbs having a lot of possible suffixes, those suffixes being fairly regular, and English taking a lot of its "fancy" words with French (or adopting a Latin version that's close to what French adopted from Latin). I still couldn't come close to thinking about achieving it. He is doing the extreme sport version of scrabble for sure. And these advantages in French make it even more impressive that he could do the same even in Spanish.
- Asraelite 2y ago
  I actually don't think the exceptions are much of a problem overall. Most irregularities in a language happen with the most common words. Once you go from learning the most common words to simply learning all the words, the relative frequency of irregular formations that you encounter would go down dramatically.
BurningFrog 2y ago
98% of those words are useless for competitive Scrabble.
- zem 2y ago
  he knows them anyway

wongarsu 2y ago

Scrolled to a random position in the file, and there's 37 lines of all declinations of the word "monologue". Followed by a bunch of nouns with just two to four forms, followed by 47 declinations of the word "monopolise". What he did is no small feat. You still have to memorize which suffixes are possible in which verbs (there are rules he would pick up on, but there are exceptions to the rules). But it is made easier by French verbs having a lot of possible suffixes, those suffixes being fairly regular, and English taking a lot of its "fancy" words with French (or adopting a Latin version that's close to what French adopted from Latin). I still couldn't come close to thinking about achieving it. He is doing the extreme sport version of scrabble for sure. And these advantages in French make it even more impressive that he could do the same even in Spanish.

Asraelite 2y ago
I actually don't think the exceptions are much of a problem overall. Most irregularities in a language happen with the most common words. Once you go from learning the most common words to simply learning all the words, the relative frequency of irregular formations that you encounter would go down dramatically.

BurningFrog 2y ago

98% of those words are useless for competitive Scrabble.

zem 2y ago
he knows them anyway