A New Zealand man has won the French language Scrabble championship, despite not speaking French. Nigel Richards triumphed over Schélick Ilagou Rekawe, from French-speaking Gabon, in the final in Louvain, Belgium, on Monday. Richards’ friend Liz Fagerlund, former president of the New Zealand Scrabble Association, revealed that he had been studying the language closely for approximately eight weeks in preparation.
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.
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