If you are planning to write GRE Exam, you need to have a very good vocabulary and most of the students have trouble with that. If you are a good reader of Novels and magazines you may be better than many others, but still its almost impossible to have known all the words listed in most recommended word list, Barrons Word List for GRE. For a good score in Verbal section in the GRE exam, you must memorize most of the list.
Let me tell you for sure that its not at all easy to memorize all 3500 words in the Barrons list, there are few very popular techniques for this tedious job but none of them are perfectly working for everyone.
1- Memorize the List
Its brute force way, if you are good at remembering things, you probably can go for it and simply remember the list, but believe me, its not possible for most of us. This method hardly works for anybody.
2- Picture Dictionary
This method, however, works for some people but its very time consuming but surely better than the first method.
3- Flash Cards
Keep the flash cards of each word with its meaning at its back and try to revise it anywhere you get free time, never worked for me.
4- Mnemonic Way
Relating to each word to something funny, weird. Very effective way, but you can’t remember all the words that way, each word may not suit for it.
5- Etmylogy
Break the word in terms of its root , suffix and prefix. Very tedious. Works for few words.
Other than that there are few methods like writing stories that use these words are effective but time taking. So, most of the traditional methods don’t work most of the times. There are few things very clear :
1- It is impossible to memorize the world list completely over night. It will surely take time.
2- The methods that make it boring to remember words will not likely to work, you must enjoy what you are doing.
What actually works?
What actually works will vary from person to person but generally if you make it enjoyable and interesting it is more probable that you will continue putting efforts without giving up. You should work out each word yourself and enjoy it. Use different methods for each word whatever suits to it. Discussing the usage of these words with others is also very helpful.
How does this blog help me building my vocabulary?
As I said earlier, you should work out each word in order to memorize it for long time, I want to make this blog a playground for all the aspirants and discuss their ways to memorize each word. They can share how they relate it to the real word to keep it in their mind. I will post each word with its meaning, first five Google Image Search results and many other things I feel can help in memorizing the word. If you are still wondering how exactly it is helpful, read out FAQs here.
All the best.
Memorize GRE Word List 