Lesson 6 | Vocab
How to Win at Scrabble
In 2015, Nigel Richards won the French Scrabble championship. But the strange thing about this achievement is...he actually can't speak French!
So how did he win? Well, he simply took nine weeks to memorize a French dictionary! But while knowing tens of thousands of words will help you win at Scrabble, it won’t help you communicate with another person with those words. Language, after all, is about more than sticking a bunch of words in a row:
beautiful realized were the Jim expensive that quickly gowns
That's not a sentence; it doesn't communicate a coherent message. But if you rearrange the words following the rules of English syntax, you get a sentence:
Jim quickly realized that the beautiful gowns were expensive.¹
That’s why both the grammar lessons and the vocab lessons in our Greek courses are essential. You need more than a Greek vocabulary—you need to learn the rules of Greek syntax, how to form verbs in different persons and numbers, how to identify the subject of a sentence, and so on. But at the same time, you can’t communicate meaning without the words themselves and knowing what they mean!
So let’s not focus so much on grammar that we neglect vocab, nor neglect grammar to focus too much on vocab. We are not looking to win the Koine Greek Scrabble championship. Neither do we want to be grammar masters without anything to say because we do not know any words. No, our goal is to actually understand the language.