Nigel Richards is from brand new Zealand. He is a worldwide Scrabble champ, but their many feat that is impressive just be winning the French-language Scrabble World Championship without actually knowing how to speak French.
Memorizing vs learning
If you’ve ever tried to learn a language, you know that there are two parts to success – grammar and vocabulary. You can be great at grammar, but then it doesn’t do you much good if you can’t memorize new words. Similarly, you are able to understand plenty of language terms, but them together in a sentence (or even pronounce them), you can’t actually speak the language if you can’t put.
Nigel Richards memorizes the dictionary
Before trying French, New Zealander Nigel to his hand Richards won a few English-language Scrabble championships. But that obviously was not an adequate amount of a challenge. That is as he chose to tackle French.
But if you are playing Scrabble, sentence structure does not matter, just the terms into the dictionary do. Therefore Richards decided in an attempt to memorize as numerous terms as you possibly can through the dictionary that is french.
Clearly, he did a job that is great because he overcome every one of the real French speakers in a 2015 competition.
According to NPR (cited below): “It had been just in belated might [of 2014] that Richards started their quest to win the world that is french, according to the French Scrabble Federation. That’s when he set about memorizing the Scrabble that is french dictionary”
Richards obviously has an memory that is impeccable. After all, there are 386,000 words in French Scrabble and only 187,000 in North American Scrabble.
Scrabble expert Stefan Fatsis told NPR: “Basically, what he does is, he looks at word lists and looks at dictionary pages… he can conjure the image up of exactly what he’s seen. He said that when he really hears a word, it can n’t stick his brain in. But for him to recall the image of it if he sees it once, that’s enough. I do not understand in the event that’s a memory that is photographic i recently think it is a thing that their mind chemistry enables him to accomplish. ” — WTF enjoyable facts
Source: “Winner Of French Scrabble Title Does Not Speak French” — NPR
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