How to Improve Your Vocabulary for the GRE Exam

Share this post

Nature of GRE (GRADUATE RECORD EXAMINATION): GRE is highly popular among students worldwide seeking to pursue Masters’ Degree from the top universities around the world. During GRE classes, GRE Verbal part must not be confused with testing English. Even though you, as a student, are supposed to have all English Language basics aligned including conventions of standard English and correct spellings, you are tested on reasoning and logic ingrained in English Language. Moreover, another integral part of GRE Verbal is GRE vocabulary. Not just vocabulary, but GRE vocabulary is what every GRE student is exposed to while preparing for GRE Verbal. When you look at GRE online prep on any website, you will always find in some part of the advertisement a very conspicuous display of Vocabulary tab or strip. This is because any GRE training course can never be imagined without vocabulary relevant to GRE. Hence the nature GRE cannot be ascertained with vocabulary. In this article we will be discussing how to improve your vocabulary for the GRE exam. Read more about the importance of vocabulary building in GRE prep.

How to approach learning GRE vocabulary for your GRE exam

During GRE classes, students find learning GRE vocabulary a tedious task and a hard nut to crack. But there is always a simple way of doing anything that is difficult. First of all, you, as a student, need to understand how much vocabulary is needed for GRE prep. One does not need to learn the whole dictionary or even half or one fourth of the dictionary. There are GRE-centric words that are specific to the test. So, if you learn during your GRE training course, those words that are specific to GRE, then you can assume that you have learned more than 90 percent of the words. So, what about the 10 percent remaining? – for this the strategy of elimination of the answer choices while doing the question can be used. We will talk about that in the later part of this article.

Following points must be kept in mind while for your approach of learning GRE vocabulary, whether you study through GRE training classes or opt for GRE online prep:

• Make a written plan – By assuming a tentative date as to when you would take your test, you must target learning ‘x’ number of words per week. Let us assume, for instance, that you have combined three months of GRE coaching and revision time. You must always learn all the required words at least one month before the actual test date. That leaves two months to learn all the words. You may divide all the words with the number of weeks (eight weeks in this case), which leaves around 250 words per week. Do not panic as there will be words within the list that you must be already acquainted with.
• Learn the words in the form of synonyms. By learning lists, we mean the list of groups of synonyms and their antonyms. Learning lists has several benefits. The process of learning vocabulary is faster because you don’t need to understand that the meanings of the words in the groups that you are learning have disparate meanings. So all words have connected meanings. Synonyms does not mean that the meanings of the words that are synonymous with each other are the same. They are ‘similar’, with varying intensity and usage. Another advantage is that while recalling the meaning of a word while doing questions, you may not be stressing on your neurons because you are not required to learn the meanings deeply. If you know that a word ‘xyx’ belongs to a particular list, you will be able to answer the related question correctly.
• For many students, learning vocabulary for the GRE exam is arduous and irritating in the beginning. This problem is faced by those students who have been away from reading for years, or who have not much in their career as students. But it must be realized that this problem of not being able to tackle words is temporary if you form a habit. Start with a few words per day and then gradually increase learning words. Do not try to gormandize on too many words otherwise it would be both an irritating and crammed thing to do.
• You may also face another problem- of forgetting words that you have learned so far. However, it is common to forget and not to retain all the words you learned last night or last week, say. To solve this problem or rather mitigate the problem of forgetting, write the words and their meanings, and make sentences from the words you learn, especially those words that you find difficult. This will enable you to retain the difficult words for a longer period of time than usual.

BEST RESOURCES FOR LEARNING GRE VOCABULARY: During your GRE preparation for the verbal section, you will come across scores of resources in the form of applications, and websites. This might lead you to get confused as to which source to embrace because there is a question of reliability and authenticity. If you are preparing especially by yourself, then the best way is to learn from Jamboree’s Online portal which gives you access to the most comprehensive set of all GRE strategies, including GRE vocabulary. The best part of it is that there are not excessive and redundant words. Moreover, the GRE vocabulary section in the online Jamboree Portal is very user-friendly and effective in making you learn through its options of learning, revising and testing yourself. On the flipside, you can download Simplified Vocabulary Jamboree Application for vocabulary which is absolutely free.

HOW TO APPROACH GRE VOCABULARY:

• The best way to approach GRE vocabulary is to learn in the form of lists. This will help you recall the words easily while solving questions such as Sentence Equivalence and Text Completion.
• Merely learning and retaining the meanings of the words is not enough. It is important to be able to use them while solving questions (Sentence Equivalence and Text Completion). It is extremely important to know that Sentence Equivalence and Text Completion questions test the meaning of the words in the context, and not literally. That indeed, makes it easier to work through the questions while eliminating the answer choices in these questions.
• Vocabulary is not only important for Sentence Equivalence and Text Completion Questions. Its importance is equally valid for Reading Comprehension for you won’t be able to comprehend the RCs properly or eliminate the answer choices if you do not have good vocabulary. While solving RCs, you need to understand, again, the meanings that words and sentences convey, on the contextual basis and not literal. Indeed, there is a separate question type called ‘Vocabulary in Context’ in RCs that tests the meaning of a word or phrase in the context in which it is used in the passage.

Conclusion: Overall, whether you take GRE coaching classes, or opt for GRE online prep, it will be easy to understand the concept if you have a strong Vocabulary base. Try, if possible, to start learning vocabulary before you approach the GRE training course. This will make you more confident even before you start learning vocabulary during your GRE classes. Also, remember that learning vocabulary is not just a part of your GRE exam preparation, but it should help you otherwise also in future.

Share this post