One very popular TV show in the UK is the game show Countdown, in which two
contestants compete to see who can make the longest words from a bunch of letters and who
can arrive at a given three-digit number applying addition, subtraction, multiplication and
division with six numbers. I’ve seen it, and thoroughly enjoyed it, and played through
episodes of it on YouTube before in my free time, and I am good enough at the words game
that I usually get a word of six or seven letters; I have actually managed to get a nine a couple
of times, and even solved the endgame conundrum before the contestants a couple of times!
But I’m still nowhere near as good as the best players on the show.
But the show is popular enough that it caught on way over in Australia, where it goes by the
name “Letters and Numbers” rather than Countdown (Richard Morecroft, David Astle and
Lily Serna) and I’ve played through episodes of that on YouTube as well. I wonder what
other countries in the world have their equivalent of it. Both the British and the Australian
versions have their own Wikipedia article. The same can be said of the French game show
“Des chiffres et des lettres” (literally: “Letters and numbers”) – and I decided to see what
French words I was capable of when I played an episode of that recently in my free time.
Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwfmdLKxoUs
The French version has considerable differences from the British and Australian ones, I
noted. The letters game gives the contestants ten letters to work with– with the British and
Australian versions it’s only nine. While it’s 30 seconds for the letters rounds, it’s 35-40 for
the numbers rounds. It seems pre-recorded, given how all the longest words noted by the
host’s assistants and the calculations in the numbers rounds (including the ones stated by the
contestants) are displayed on the TV screen rather than anyone on screen having to write
anything out. And, in the British and Australian versions, for the words games contestants are
allowed to choose individual letters one after the other (either a random consonant or a
random vowel), which allows them to ponder possibilities even before the last letter is up
there and the clock has been started. That’s not the case in the French version: all the letters
are essentially all chosen at once, as the host asks the contestant how many vowels they want
in the collection of letters to be played with in a particular words round and then a random
bunch of letters fitting the arrangement is just put forth there and then by the host’s assistants.
I noted the contestants tapping away at calculators during the numbers rounds (they only have
access to pen and paper in the British and Australian versions). The French version also has
challenges which don’t feature in the British and Australian versions: calculation of an
extended-length sum and, at the end, one of the contestants gets given a whole series of sets
of letters and is told to find a word of a certain number of letters in each one. I don’t know
how he did as well as he did; that was just too much for me. My French is good but it’s not
THAT good!
When I was at school, I remember our French teacher once dividing the class up into groups
and having us play Scrabble in French as a fun end-of-term activity – it could never have
progressed without us trying to steer our attention away from associating English words with
the individual letters available to us, instead focussing on French ones. It was just like that for
me when I played my episode of French Countdown, only I was under more pressure on that
score i.e. the time limit.
You know, you really have to be trained (or conditioned) to develop a sense of certain things
without even really trying to look for them, and this is as true in the realm of language as it is

in anything else. One might ask: is it even possible to have a “strategy” (with all its
descriptive – not prescriptive – rules) when playing this game? In the case of letters games in
Countdown (in English), let us consider: regardless of the breadth of your English
vocabulary, what letter combinations are common in English? It could be argued that a
commonly applied tactic is to see if there is an R, or an S and a T, if it has been determined
that there is an E: for (nearly) all adjective comparatives have the suffix -er, and (nearly) all
adjective superlatives have the suffixed -est. It’s simply based on knowledge of the rules of
the English language, and that’s all there is to it. Meanwhile, one example of a common
combination of letters I can think of is -ine – it cannot be denied that it is present in a number
of nouns (e.g. wine, vine, mine…), adjectives (e.g. divine, bovine, fine…) and verbs (e.g.
recline, define, decline…) alike (with the word “fine” having the distinction of qualifying as a
word in all three categories), when you take the time to look at it from that perspective. In the
case of French: I won’t go into unnecessary detail but the letters of verb conjugation endings
(for number, gender, and grammatical tense) can indeed be used widely with any verb you
could put together with the rest of the letters.
I’ve included details of the words I got in the four letters rounds in this episode of French
Countdown, with related comments, at this link
https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2
FGTTranslator%2Fposts%2Fpfbid0LcUn2Yja7zAgokHLKNEaegRY7zG11Ns5Psq9DuTzsk
WpBUjn2GK7rw77ZBd3ThtDl& . So if you want to play this for yourself and only see what
I got afterwards, you can.
Final comments:
*I learned the expression “Le compte est bon” watching this. I would have said something
like “J’ai la figure exacte”, but “Le compte est bon” sounds like something I should have
learned while I was studying in Poitiers.
*I looked in Google to see if they have an equivalent of the show in Germany – they don’t
seem to; which, in my opinion, is just as well, seeing how easy it is to make up compound
words (multiple words astringed and treated as a single one – they do it all the time).