Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0287: Reprise: How do I find and memorize GRE vocabulary words?

Episode Date: April 14, 2015

Today Timothy revisits the question on how to find and memorize GRE vocabulary words, with some extra comments on how he would change his answer today. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Hey everyone, this is Timothy from Master of Memory and welcome to episode 287. Today we're doing a reprise of episode 57 about memorizing vocabulary for the GRE. In this episode, I recommended finding the words based on existing tests and readings that are similar to those that would be expected to be found on the test because you're likely to find the right vocabulary there. One thing that I would add is that for the acceleration of the volume of vocabulary you can learn in a short period of time, instead of slowly reading and copying down the text, instead you can actually take entire documents and copy and paste the text,

replace all the spaces with carriage returns, you have to get rid of all the punctuation as well. But then put that in a spreadsheet, sort the words by frequency, eliminate all familiar words, and then go from the top of the list down. So you're quickly finding all the most important words from all the documents that you look up. I personally have done this with the Federalist papers and plan to do it with other documents for vocabulary for my own students who are studying for the SAT. And so it's a similar process for that. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Jing asked on Facebook about memorizing vocabulary in preparation for the GRE.

The biggest recommendation I can give for learning vocabulary for a test or a standardized test of some kind is that you actually go through sample tests and readings similar to those that you'd see on the real test. So you may be able to get your hands on some practice materials, or you might just be able to find some readings based on recommendations of other people on things that will be similar to those that come up on the test. But in order to find the right vocabulary that works for you, you'll take those readings, and then every time you come across a word that you don't know, just quickly throw it into a spreadsheet. So you'll have a bunch of words in one column. And then after a good amount of this reading, maybe a series of practice tests or about 20 readings,

you'll sort these words in the spreadsheet and figure out which words are the most frequently used that you don't know. Unfortunately, it would take a good amount of reading and or quite a bit of practice testing just to get enough words to find out what the real frequency is, but it can be done. Or alternatively, you can leverage someone else's work if they're doing this, and I'm considering doing this pretty soon for my own SAT and PSAT students, just to make sure that I have the best vocabulary, not just throwing a bunch of vocabulary at them, but I'm actually focusing on the most frequent vocabulary because you can really get a lot of leverage from that. But of course, a lot of words that will end up on the list for one person would

be words that somebody else already knows. So it really is sort of an individual thing. So I do recommend trying this out. But after you have your list of vocabulary that you think is the most likely to come up on the test, you're going to memorize this vocabulary using the tactics that I talked about back in episode five for learning vocabulary based on stressed syllable mnemonics and episode 15, which is about creating a schedule so that you can learn a lot of vocabulary, a big list of vocabulary, in a short amount of time. Now, here's the thing. Even though you're going to be learning all of these words in a short amount of time, you want to work on learning usage, at least if you're going to plan to use these in your essays. You'll want these vocabulary words, of course,

and you'll want to get a general feel for what each of them means so that you can learn them in the readings and the other things that you'll be doing that don't involve actually using the words so you can just interpret the meanings. But if you're actually going to be using words, you want to be really familiar with the way that they're used, and that takes extensive reading and some writing experience. Personally, the reason that I scored much lower on the SAT than on the PSAT was because of my essay. On the PSAT, I got a perfect score on the writing section,

but on the essay itself, on the SAT, the two times that I took it, I got scores of 9 and 8 out of 12, and I think that it's largely because I was trying to use vocabulary that I took it, I got scores of 9 and 8 out of 12. And I think that it's largely because I was trying to use vocabulary that I didn't really know very well. I knew the general meaning of it so I could understand the words if I read them, but I didn't know them well enough to use them, so you have to make that distinction. All right, I hope you've enjoyed this reprise episode. For anyone who has any questions about learning or memorizing anything faster than ever, feel free still to leave a message at masterofmemory.com slash question,

and I'll be able to respond quickly to your message from wherever I am. I just won't be able to record an episode on that topic until I'm back in the States in May. Meanwhile, if you want to support the show, please check out our Spanish course at masterofmemory.com slash Spanish. Or if you want to follow my adventures in Argentina or wherever else I might happen to be, you can do that at timothymoser.com.