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.

très bien

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

  • @TheWordBotcher
    9•19 days ago

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

    • @[email protected]OP
      5•19 days 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.

      • @[email protected]M
        5•19 days ago

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

        • @[email protected]OP
          3•19 days 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.

          • @[email protected]M
            3•19 days 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

  • @[email protected]
    7•19 days 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