Kiwi wins Spanish Scrabble title without speaking Spanish

[richy21]

I saw this article today, it sounds like he either uses memory techniques or his brain naturally creates imagery.

A New Zealander studied for a year to win the Spanish world Scrabble title....

Interesting quote from the article:

Richards speaks no Spanish and started memorizing the language’s Scrabble word list a year ago, his friend Liz Fagerlund -– a New Zealand Scrabble official -– told The Associated Press.

“He can’t understand why other people can’t just do the same thing,” she said. “He can look at a block of words together and once they go into his brain as a picture he can just recall that very easily.”

[Josh (Josh Cohen)]

There’s a section about him in this book: Ultralearning by Scott Young

[vector]

here’s his other job.

Winner Of French Scrabble Title Does Not Speak French

The Scrabble career of Nigel Richards went from great to astounding this week, after he won the French-language Scrabble World Championships. A New Zealand native, Richards has won several English-language titles; his new victory follows weeks of studying a French dictionary. “Basically, what he does is, he looks at word lists and looks at dictionary pages… he can conjure up the image of what he has seen. He told me that if he actually hears a word, it doesn’t stick in his brain. But if he se…

[pultsari]

Fascinating and impressive.

Also, more usefully to me this highlights a limitation for the application of memorization techniques for language learning.

I would suggest pinning this in the language learning section.