Learning Lots of Vocabulary

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Julia calling from San Diego, California.

How are you?

Hey, Julia, what’s up?

So my question, the situation I’m in is I’m currently studying for the GRE.

And I find myself disproportionately struggling with learning all the vocab.

There’s math, I’m able to soak that in.

But when it comes to learning a bunch of new words a day that I’ve never come across, it’s a lot harder than you’d think.

Well, maybe not for you guys, but for me, it’s harder than I’d want it to be.

So I was hoping you guys could offer some suggestions on learning a lot of new, obscure vocabulary in a relatively short amount of time.

Oh, wow. Julia, what are you planning to study in grad school?

I’m hoping to get into physician assistant school.

Oh, okay.

Tons of new vocabulary there.

Yeah, really. A lot of vocabulary we don’t know.

How many words a day are you trying to learn?

So at least what I’ve seen online for suggested study schedules, they all recommend around 10 at least new words a day.

And how much time do you have until you take the GRE?

A month from now.

Oh, wow.

Okay, so what are you doing?

Yeah, what are you doing to try to learn the vocabulary?

Currently, I’m spending every free second of my day, which, I mean, I work and do other things, but a couple hours a day doing online practice questions.

And I paid a couple hundred bucks for an online program that kind of walks me through how to study and what to study.

And then for the vocab, I’ve even got apps on my phone that do little flashcards.

And if I come across a word I don’t know, like while watching the news, I’ll look it up, try to look up sentences with that word.

But even then, three weeks later, if I’m taking a practice test and the word comes up, it doesn’t mean I know how to use it in a sentence and in context just because I saw a flashcard.

Are you looking up the etymologies of the words as well, where they come from, the origins?

Or at least their component parts?

Sometimes, but no, I haven’t been doing that for every word.

Yeah, I find that that helps me to learn words if I know the roots of the words.

You know, it’ll take extra time to look them up in the dictionary, but I’m thinking about, for example, the medical term fulguration.

F-U-L-G-U-R-A-T-I-O-N, which means cauterization.

But if you know that it comes from the Latin word for lightning, it’s easier to remember.

You know, they’re little word pictures inside of etymologies and word origins like that.

So they help me remember.

The other thing I’m wondering is, I don’t know, this is kind of a silly suggestion,

But when I was in high school, I set my geometry book to music so that I could memorize the theorems.

You know, like the product of the hypotenuse is equal to the product of the legs.

I had a whole song about that, and I’m just, you know, I mean, how did you learn the alphabet?

You learned it by singing it.

And I’m just wondering if you can combine some other sense with it, like, I don’t know, singing the words.

Interesting, yeah.

Well, and that would, I mean, my job is I’m a nanny, and so a lot of times when I’m taking this girl out on walks with the dog, I’ll just talk to myself and kind of say, you know, the word and then the definition.

And, you know, she doesn’t know what I’m saying.

She’s one years old.

But, hey, just me talking.

She enjoys that.

So, hey, why don’t I put it in song form?

I’m sure she’d love that.

Yeah, that kind of self-talk really helps.

That’s what they call it in the memorization business, self-talk, where you just run around like you got to screw loose just talking to yourself and saying nonsense.

What sounds to nonsense to other people?

Yeah, but you engage another part of your brain by singing it.

A similar kind of self-talk I’ve heard about is where you record yourself, which is much easier in the cell phone era, and then you just play it back at other times when you can’t have the materials in front of your eyes, like when you’re driving or doing chores, that sort of thing.

That’s a good idea.

Only you guys would suggest that.

You know that most people don’t like hearing their voice played back on recording.

But it’s just between you and you, right?

Nobody else is judging you.

It’s just the two of you, you and your old self, right?

But that is a good suggestion, yeah.

This kind of memorization has been a struggle for students as far back as the written record goes, trying to cram it all in.

There are many, many strategies.

It sounds like you’re doing the best that you can given the time and resources available to you.

There are no magic tricks for memorizing this stuff.

The only thing I would say to other people who may anticipate graduate school many years from now is to start reading higher-level text now long before they have to get to the exam.

So start reading things like, say, The Economist or slightly more advanced magazines or periodicals so that some of this vocabulary will have been acquired naturally without a great deal of struggle long before you need it.

Well, I would suggest if you’re starting 10 years ago to take Latin because that will show you so many components of the words, and particularly if you’re going into the medical field.

Yeah, so you have a month to take Latin.

Can you master Latin in a month?

Probably won’t end up taking Latin, but I think the way they do the GRE is they don’t necessarily want you to have memorized every word in the English language, but I can imagine the test takers would want you to be able to deduce what the word means based on its Latin or Greek roots.

Yeah, Julia, I know it would be time-consuming, but I would really suggest looking the words up in the American Heritage Dictionary, which has really great etymologies.

And you might be able to associate those words with pictures or stories or something like that if you do, if you know the component parts of the words.

And they often have sample sentences, which can put them in a greater context.

Yeah.

So good luck.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And thank you guys for your help.

All right.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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