This article will help you with tricks to build your vocabulary which is extremely essential to crack revised GRE. Building vocabulary will help you not only for revised GRE, but also for all the competitive exams like GMAT, TOEFEL, IELTS and others. Having a command on English language is extremely important in today's age.
Building vocabulary requires a lot of time and patience. If you are not frequent in the use of English, it will take a lot of time to build your vocabulary. The revised GRE format is designed in such a way that the more conversant you are in the use of words, the better you will score.
Barron's wordlist is a good collection of words. In the old GRE, only the Barron's wordlist was sufficient to get you a good score. But in the revised GRE, things are different. In fact it is not even necessary that you learn all these words.
Use the following techniques to improve your vocabulary:
- Ideal way to build vocabulary is by reading a lot of books. So, if you are in your first/second year and are planning to take GRE, start reading a lot of books. Whatever books interest you, just grab them and start reading.
- Remember one thing: revised GRE tests your ability to use words and not your knowledge of words. So, knowing 1000 words with their right usage is far more helpful than learning 3500 words and their meanings.
- Whatever new words you come across, use them in your daily interactions with your family, friends, teachers, colleagues, anyone you have a conversation with.
- Converse in English as much as possible. This will help you a long way for even the passages. And try to use new words you have learnt in your conversations.
- Solve crosswords. This helped me a lot. While doing so, you will come across so many new words and you will start building your vocabulary without even realising.
- Make a study group if your friends are also taking GRE. Have small quizzes amoung yourselves. Play scrabble with your friends in study group.
- If you have only a month or two before your exam date, I would suggest solve lots and lots of revised GRE passages. You will come across a lot of new words in these passages.
- Use root methods to learn words. You can guess the meaning of words if you are able to identify the root.
- Use prefix and postfix methods. Many words can be broken up to identify their meanings. This technique is very useful if you are guessing the meaning.
- Use of flash cards and audio files will help you learn words in a different way.
- I would again repeat that in revised GRE, you must be able to fit the words in the right context. So, just learning the meanings of the words would not be sufficient. So, after your weekly learning of words, make sure that you revise the words by using them in your own sentences. This will help build your vocabulary in a much better way.
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