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Does playing Scabble increase your vocabulary

 
 
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 10:17 am
blah
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Type: Question • Score: 14 • Views: 16,368 • Replies: 25

 
dadpad
 
  3  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 10:20 am
indubitably
djjd62
 
  1  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 10:23 am
how about eating scrapple?
sozobe
 
  2  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 10:24 am
@dadpad,
THATS EXACTLY WHAT I WAS GOING TO SAY
tsarstepan
 
  1  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 10:26 am
@djjd62,
djjd62 wrote:

how about eating scrapple?

Good source of fiber!
djjd62
 
  1  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 10:28 am
@tsarstepan,
which, the scrabble or the scrapple, i mean the old school cardboard game boards and wooden tiles would be a reasonable source of dietary fiber
0 Replies
 
tsarstepan
 
  1  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 10:28 am
@tsarstepan,
Ohh... I misread... I thought you meant the wooden Scrabble pieces.
Gargamel
 
  1  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 10:29 am
@sozobe,
How very quixotic of you, Sozobe. I know that doesn't make any sense, but DOUBLE WORD SCORE, BITCHEZ!
djjd62
 
  1  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 10:29 am
@tsarstepan,
maybe some scrabble would enhance your reading abilities Razz
0 Replies
 
sozobe
 
  1  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 10:30 am
@Gargamel,
Well QUARTZY on the triple word score, BOOYA!
0 Replies
 
Thomas
 
  1  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 10:37 am
@micahhasenburg,
mcahhasenburg wrote:
Does playing Scabble increase your vocabulary

1) Scabble isn't a word. Scrabble, with an 'r', is better, but even that is just a name.

2) Although Scrabble does increase my vocabulary, it doesn't really extend the number of words I can use. For example, QAT and QI are incredibly useful words for scoring lots of points with those dreaded Q stones. Neither of them, however, helps me say anything I want to say in actual conversation.

3) On a note somewhat related to #2: As a non-native speaker of English, I find it relatively easy to guess which combinations of letters are likely to be words. In online versions of Scrabble, I can test these predictions against Scrabble's built-in dictionary and modify them as necessary. Having done that, I can then add more letters to the word to make an even longer one. This turns out to be a very effective way to come up with new words -- but there's a catch: This procedure leaves me totally ignorant of what the newly-cobbled words mean. That's another reason Scrabble isn't extending my active English vocabulary all that much.
Merry Andrew
 
  2  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 10:51 am
@micahhasenburg,
Quote:
Does playing Scabble increase your vocabulary


I very much doubt it. Most people who are avid Scrabble players simply memorize a whole lot of words, giving no thought whatever to their meaning. They couldn't use the words that they play with in a sentence if their life depended on it. I have read that people who do not even speak English have participated in official Scrabble tournaments and done fairly well. You don't need to kn ow what a word means in order to use it on a Scrabble board.

That said, I love the game. My wife and I play it all the time. I don't think it's made any difference in our everyday vocabulary. Actually, now I think of it, your question works better if the concept is reversed: people who have a good vocabulary make better scrabble players.
djjd62
 
  2  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 10:54 am
actually playing scrabble on a PSP or Nintendo DS, could increase your vocabulary, the system gives you the meaning of your word and the word your opponent used
0 Replies
 
Francis
 
  1  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 10:57 am
Andy wrote:
I have read that people who do not even speak English have participated in official Scrabble tournaments and done fairly well.

Is that weird?

I can do that in languages other than English...
Joe Nation
 
  1  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 11:36 am
@Francis,
No, Francis, it is not weird. It shows an understanding of vowel/consonant relations which shift from language to language. I am alway stunned at how well Thomas plays, but he, as do you, has a lot of insight into how words in other languages are formed. There are times when I wish I was playing in Serbo-Croatian, those are the times when my rack is filled with K's and J's and Z's.

Joe(the other day my kid played YAGI. Wha?)Nation
Francis
 
  1  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 11:48 am
@Joe Nation,
My question was a bit tongue in cheek, Joe.

What Andy meant was that people who don't even speak English, successfully participate in Tournaments in English..

Now, if you wanna exercise your Js, K, and Zs, take a look here:

J

K

Z
Joe Nation
 
  1  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 12:05 pm
@Francis,
Yes. I've read about it:
Quote:
Also competing in Division 1 were six Thai players. Scrabble is used as a tool for teaching English in schools in Thailand, and tournaments there regularly include more than 1,000 competitors. In last year's world championship, in Kuala Lumpur, the best-of-five final was played between two young Thai men, Panupol Sujjayakorn and Pakorn Nemitrmansuk, who are 18 and 27 years old, respectively. At the end of Day 3, three of the six stood in the top 11"Pakorn, Charnwit Sukhumrattanaporn (who is 25), and Komol Panyasophonlert (19).
Panupol, Pakorn, and their countrymen illustrate one of the odd truths about Scrabble: It's as much of a math game as it is a word game. Imagine that the 26 letters of the alphabet are 26 different colors. The colors are distributed in different amounts"there are 100 color pieces distributed in all, with some repetition"and certain combinations of colors, in certain orders, are acceptable, while others are not. For instance, if A = red, B = blue, and C = green, then GREENREDBLUE (i.e., CAB) would be acceptable, while no other combination of those colors would be. Many of the foreign players"most of whom are Thai"know minimal English (which speaks to the insufficiency of Scrabble as a teaching tool for linguistics). And while it's true that having a large vocabulary is a good place to start if you want to be a good Scrabble player, at the highest levels it can also be an advantage not to speak English at all.

Let's say I know that THOU is a four-letter word. If I don't automatically know whether THOUED or THOUING are words, I would probably be able to guess because I understand how nouns and verbs function as parts of speech. THOUING and THOUED seem like they would be nonsense. But in fact they are acceptable: THOU can be a verb, meaning "to address as 'thou.' " If I didn't speak English, knowing the words THOU, THOUED, and THOUING would be as simple as memorizing three "words""one of four letters, one of six letters, one of seven. But what you think of as "words," the savvy Scrabbler knows to be "letter strings." In other words, they are just combinations of letters. You wouldn't have to know whether these "words" had any relation whatsoever to each other as parts of speech, and no word"CATCH, for instance"would look any more "normal," or "reasonable," than, say, CRWTH (which is actually acceptable). So it's simple"as long as you know all the letter strings. The expert players do, and I don't.


http://www.slate.com/id/2105210/entry/2105211/
Setanta
 
  1  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 12:08 pm
It was The Reader's Digest which did it for me . . .
0 Replies
 
AbbieMcKenley
 
  1  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 01:39 pm
@Joe Nation,
Smile Sounds like it'd be easier just to learn the language...
0 Replies
 
fbaezer
 
  1  
Reply Thu 7 Jan, 2010 05:07 pm
@Thomas,
Thomas wrote:

For example, QAT and QI are incredibly useful words for scoring lots of points with those dreaded Q stones. Neither of them, however, helps me say anything I want to say in actual conversation.


I used QAT quite a bit in my early twenties.
Not the word, I concede.
 

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