Kiwi Crowned French Scrabble Champ, Doesn't Speak French (uk.news.yahoo.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by FloofahNZ@lemmy.nz to c/newzealand@lemmy.nz

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très bien

EDIT: This article was originally from 2015, my mistake in posting it now.

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[-] TheWordBotcher@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago

Guy made it his mission to beat the French using their own language while still refusing to speak it.

[-] Munkisquisher@lemmy.nz 3 points 2 weeks ago

I can't think of anything more French!

[-] Taako_Tuesday@lemmy.ca 8 points 2 weeks ago

Nigel Richards. Check out Will Anderson's youtube channel, he covers pro scrabble matches in the style of chess commentary, and he has a lot of videos featuring Nigel

[-] Dave@lemmy.nz 8 points 2 weeks ago

I thought this sounded familiar. The article is from 2015!

[-] FloofahNZ@lemmy.nz 5 points 2 weeks ago

Wow, my error not seeing the article date, sorry about that. It popped up on my feed this am. Better look more carefully in the future.

[-] Dave@lemmy.nz 5 points 2 weeks ago

Haha all good, an interesting story none the less. It's been over 9 years, think he speaks French yet?

[-] FloofahNZ@lemmy.nz 3 points 2 weeks ago

He didn’t need to in order to win the Scrabble and indeed, speaking a foreign language needs a lot more than memorising a dictionary, though that in itself was a massive accomplishment.

[-] Dave@lemmy.nz 3 points 2 weeks ago

Depends how much of the dictionary he memorised! I'd think memorising a dictionary covet to cover would be more work than learning to speak a conversational level of French, but I guess he didn't actually have to memorise the whole dictionary, just enough to have a decent number of words to play in scrabble