奇速英语

男子不懂西班牙语，却获得西班牙语拼字游戏冠军！

Being great at Scrabble typically requires an extensive vocabulary. After all, you may need to come up with obscure words and make do with the odd letters you’re given. However, a recent Scrabble championship seems to suggest that you don’t need to be well versed in a language to win; you may not even need to speak it at all. Just take a look at what a New Zealand man named Nigel Richards did. He recently won the Spanish World Scrabble Championships despite not speaking a word of Spanish.

Though this sounds abnormal, this isn’t the first time that Richards has achieved something like this. In 2015 and 2018, he defeated native French speakers to win the French-language Scrabble world championship. Naturally, he is also a master of English Scrabble, having won the World Championship in 2007, 2011, 2013, 2018, and 2019, the latter being the last year he competed. All these accolades have led to him being regarded as the greatest tournament-Scrabble player of all time.

But how does one win a world Scrabble tournament without speaking a word of the language at play? For both championships, 57-year-old Richards studied and memorized the dictionary over nine weeks. This, along with his three decades of experience in Scrabble, turned out to be good enough to get him through the 24 rounds that make up the competition.

“This is someone with very particular, incredible abilities; he’s a gifted guy,” contestant Benjamín Olaizola, who came second to Richards in the tournament, told Cadena Ser. “We are talking about a New Zealander who has won multiple championships in English — at least five of them.” Meanwhile, world champion Scrabble player Eric Salvador Tchouyo has described his style as “playing against a computer,” and that fellow competitors know they are playing for second place at best when he shows up.

For Antonio Álvarez, Spanish World Scrabble Championship ambassador, Scrabble is like “medicine for memory problems.” “You have to work on mental agility (敏捷), sums, look for words, and decide which ones are worth more,” he says. “That is why it is good for the development of intellect in children, like chess, and for getting the work on memory with senior people.”