Many players do indeed memorise groups of related words and patterns of word formation.

But Nigel Richards? He's on another level: https://youtu.be/35rqRFXPWJo?t=143 knowing even exceptions to patterns and differences between dictionaries, for 9-letter words, in a game where players only have 7 letter-tiles.

I guess he really is a world champion!

“Patterns” is the key there. Knowing that *OOD has 6ish options is more useful than memorizing each word.

Depends which language learners. There are people who can learn 50 new words a day for months, but those people are rare and there feats are probably not replicable for most of us.

https://isaak.net/mandarin/ is an example

edit: Isaak is great, but it was 22 words per day not 50

My pace is typically 35 words a day when learning languages and most people think that's insane. It's still only around 1000 a month, which is why I chose that number. That's on the order of 12k a year if you don't miss a single day, which you usually do.

The claim here is memorizing a full dictionary in 9 weeks. That has to be at least 40,000 words in 63 days. 634 words per day. And then or forgetting it.

It's beyond rare. Its alien.

Have you learnt many languages? I wish I had the energy to wanna do it.

In school 35 words a day would be really pushing it for me. It had a really hard time learning English words. I had to study like an hour for 20 words to pass the test. But I learned grammar really fast.

Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Fluent in Japanese, can watch kdrama and mostly follow along and have basic conversations in Korean, forgot virtually all the Chinese I did but I managed to pass HSK2 after 2 months of study and then HSK3 the following month. I was only in China for 3 months on a work trip, so I thought I'd have some fun.

What do you use to learn different languages? Firstly, where you get your vocabulary from but also pronunciation and grammar?

Anki, Netflix, Preply and social clubs.

I start by front loading all the grammar study up to upper-intermediate level as fast as possible. Usually a premade Anki deck of a few thousand sentences will be available for this.

Vocab I pick up from native media. I just read or watch whatever I'm interested in, lookup words as I go and put them into Anki. I do full immersion and it works well as access to entertainment in my target languages is a key goal.

Pronunciation I pick up through a crap tonne of exposure to native media.

Conversation is through a combination of private tutoring and finding people who speak my target languages to hang out with.

That's fairly different though, he doesn't need to learn the definitions, just memorize the strings. Which is still unbelievable.

Native speakers have an inventory on the order of 30,000 ~ 40,000 words, and it takes them 30 years for their vocab to reach its peak. I had an Anki deck I built up over a 2 year period containing 17.5k vocab for Japanese and I would still frequently encounter words I didn't know.

If you don't actually know the meanings of the words, they may as well be random. What do you have to remember them by if you have no meaning to attach to them?

It's not even an insane feat. It's inhuman.

Inhuman might be going too far since it would imply Nigel Richards isn’t human. <End pedantic rant>

Also if one takes character patterns (which words are) and attach other characteristics, such as number of occurrences of individual characters or use ascii numbering to convert to numbers, then these character patterns (aka words) might be simpler to memorise.

Meaning is only necessary if you intend to speak the language.

Well he sure ain't a regular human.

If you're applying mnemonics to remember things then the act of doing so also takes time and energy. The issue here is the volume of information in the stated time span.

It’s certainly an amazing feat and it demonstrates what humans can actually do if they set their minds to it.

Just a pity that there are so many regular humans.

I don't think it really demonstrates what humans can do if they can put their mind to it. I think it demonstrates what a 1 in 8 billion type edge case looks like.

Yeah, likely an outlier for hardware acceleration, just like some people are insanely good at reconizing faces they saw once 20 years ago. That’s not cognitive load, that’s specialized parts of the brain performing far better than most people.

A world where human intelligence made such rapid process as CPUs. Stuff of science fiction.

Imagine if that’s the norm though. I doubt very much we would be wondering how to get to Mars.

Also Nigel Richards probably doesn’t spend much time watching Netflix or shopping on Amazon. Probably very much focussed on scrambling.

A world where one in eight billion binge watches Netflix would truly be an interesting world!

Apparently he doesn't own a computer. Imagine a world where none of us owned computers!