Shows from our childhood can teach us a lot... even GRE vocab!

or your bookshelf, or radio, or whatever. When it comes to remembering GRE words, it really helps to link them to something you know.

Here are just ten examples of GRE words showing up in shows, movies, or books that you might know. If you’re a visual or auditory learner, try searching for GRE words that are bugging you on YouTube to see if any helpful references come up!

It might be clear after working your way through this post that these references come from the perspective of a 30-something American woman. The references that come to mind for you might be completely different, but the sentiment remains the same “ link the words to things you know, and they’re likely to stick with you.

1. Leery: If you’re the right age to remember Dawson’s Creek, you know that Dawson Leery was always worried about someone breaking his heart. To be leery means to be guarded or wary and not trust others. We knew you never should have trusted Joey, Dawson. She broke your heart.

2. Wily: Why was Wile E. Coyote so darn obsessed with that roadrunner anyway? He certainly did try some clever, crafty, tricky, sneaky stuff. Maybe that’s how he got his name, since that’s what wily means.

3. Plucky: If you’re between the ages of 25 and 35, you probably remember Plucky Duck from Tiny Toon Adventures. The word plucky means courageous, brave, and game for adventure “ and Plucky was perfectly all those things, always coming up with egotistical schemes where he tried to undertake some mammoth feat.

4. Craven: In The Secret Garden, Master Craven is so afraid to face life after his wife dies that he locks up her garden, retreats from the world, and even avoids their ailing son at any cost. Perhaps he got his name because craven means spineless, timid, or fainthearted. Don’t worry “ he gets it together by the end of the book.

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When it comes to studying for the quant portion of the GRE, I’m a big advocate of mixing a variety of study styles. The GRE pulls questions from a big selection of question types and content areas, and pulling your study habits from a variety of strategies can help you keep up.

I encourage you to take a look at your study patterns and see if anything’s missing. Are you only practicing in short stints but never working for a full-exam-length of time? Are you only practicing mixed sets but never targeting particular question types? You might want to consider mixing it up!

Systematic vs. Cherry-picking

There is clearly merit to a systematic study approach. Working your way through your study materials in order ensures that you cover all the material you need to prepare for the test. It also ensures that you give adequate time to each area.

On the other hand, cherry-picking the areas you want to study lets you focus your attention on the areas that most need your attention. It also allows you to study effectively on a crunched schedule if you already have a comfortable, working knowledge of math basics.

These strategies can be effectively combined to maximize their benefits. Do you want to cover all the material? Yes. But what happens when you get to a topic you don’t understand? Don’t fixate and get stuck there; note it and move on! The math concepts on the exam are related to one another, so there’s a good chance that when you come back to a topic later, you’ll understand it differently than the first time around. You also may want to break away from your study system and pay some immediate attention to concepts that newly make sense to you, or that you thought you had mastered but then notice you’ve forgotten.

Depth vs. Breadth
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I remember in a high school chemistry class, my teacher said, There are a few magic numbers. One of them is pi. One of them is e. Anyone know another one? Jane? I had no idea what he was talking about. Eight? I guessed. Obviously I missed the point.

But today’s magic number is seven. While there are lots of different ways to classify numbers, there are seven categories of numbers that make all the difference when trying to move quickly and correctly through the Quantitative Comparison section of the GRE.

Seven Important Categories of Numbers

Picture a number line. In the middle, you’ve got zero. (Okay, I know the number line doesn’t have a middle. But you get the idea.) On either side of that, you have positive and negative proper fractions. (For the rest of this post, I’m just going to use fractions to refer to proper fractions, meaning fractions with an absolute value less than one.) Next, moving outward, you hit one and negative one. And then, you hit positive and negative integers other than one.

While there are other categories of numbers that matter (primes, perfect squares, odds, evens, etc.), these are the seven that come to my mind fastest when I’m trying to come up with two alternative results in a QC questions.  When we’re trying to find two different results, we always look to try numbers that are fundamentally different. And these categories churn out some fast differences that are important in matters that QC cares about testing.

When are these sets of numbers most helpful? I’m glad you asked.

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Anyone who’s taken my GRE class can tell you that I’m not a vocab girl. I never took Latin, I pretty much don’t know any roots, and I’m terrible at learning foreign languages. So how did I get a perfect score on the GRE? For vocab, the biggest skill for me is mnemonic devices.

All for the game

I think it’s great that some teachers want to use the GRE as a way to inspire a love of learning in students. You’ll use this vocab all your life! You’ll sound so smart! Start reading the Economist every day! I just really? You’re an adult. You have infinite things you could learn about, and infinite resources to learn about them, and finite time to do it in. If you were passionate about vocab and wanted to learn more of it, you already would be! And who is really ever going to care if you can use puerile or penumbra in a sentence?

For me, studying for the GRE is all about the game, and the game here is getting GRE points. That’s it. I don’t need to know this word for life. I need to know it to get it right on the exam. And I like that mindset, because I feel like it presents me with a defined challenge that I can win. And I like to win.

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I have a GRE class that’s right now winding down to our couple final classes, and the first panicked email has just come in. This always happens in GRE (and GMAT and LSAT) classes as the end approaches. People start freaking out, because they’re studying, and they’re learning things, and they know more than they did before “ but the score isn’t budging. Or if it is budging, it’s not increasing enough! Or worst, it’s going down! And they start to lose hope. But they’re just in the dip.

The Studying Dip

When Seth Godin wrote about The Dip, he was talking about the time in a business where you feel like things will never improve, but they’re just about to get better. He was trying to quantify, or at least clarify, when you should stick with it despite the obstacles, versus when you are just on a steady downward streak.

When we talk about the dip, we’re talking about that time in studying for a standardized test when you’re working, and working, and working, and you wonder, Is this working?

The Bad News

Let’s start with the bad news first. The bad news is that if what you’re doing isn’t making your score go up, after a number of weeks, you have to change it. But this section is very short because that’s the only bad news.

The Good News

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Took the GRE once and it didn’t go exactly as you planned? Join the club. I’ve always been pretty good at standardized tests, and tests in general. So I thought I could just sort of review the GRE material, show up, and do a great job. But that’s not what happened. I didn’t get a great score. I didn’t even get a good score. I got a terrible score.

The GRE really has a special way of making you feel dumb. The questions look easy, at a glance. You’re just deciding which of two values is bigger, and they’re often expressed in very simple terms. Or you’re picking a word to put in a sentence! And sometimes they are words you’ve heard a thousand times, but you still can’t be quite sure what they mean. It’s not like they’re asking you to build a rocket. And yet there we are, smart, educated people, driven to frustration by this seemingly simple test.

But it’s not simple. You already know that “ presumably, you’re reading this because you’re studying for the GRE. And whether this is the first time you’re taking the test or your getting ready for your next shot, here are a few pieces of advice from someone who’s been there.

Don’t get discouraged.

This might not seem like an important step, but it really is. Succeeding at the GRE takes perseverance, and it’s hard to stick with it if you don’t see success as a possibility.

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Grouping to win.

I am not a great vocab learner. I never took Latin in high school, so I don’t know any roots. I did take Spanish “ but I was terrible at it. Ultimately for me, the best way to learn vocab is to learn vague definitions by grouping words together.

Most GRE questions can be better attacked if you know vaguely what a word means than if you have an exact definition memorized but you don’t really understand it. Sure, there are questions that depend on nuance of meaning. But if you have a basic understanding of a word, that’s almost always enough.

I find it easiest to learn vocab words by grouping them together. Two of my favorite groups are presented here. These groups contain a lot of words, so it’s helpful for both memory and for learning synonyms and antonyms.

To talk or not to talk? First, not to talk.

There are a LOT of words on the GRE that have to do with how talkative or quiet someone is. For example, the words reticent, taciturn, terse, laconic and brusque all basically mean not saying much. They are different in meaning from one another, to some extent. But I contend that you can get pretty far on the GRE without knowing that.

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Studying vocabulary was probably my least favorite part of preparing for the GRE. Nope, that’s not true. It was definitely my least favorite part. The first time I took the GRE, I thought I could roll in cold and knock it out of the park. That’s another nope. My math score was killer, but my lack of esoteric vocabulary knowledge killed me.

So I had to learn it, and learn I did—all the way to a 1600. We all know some of the good vocabulary learning tricks covered in the Manhattan Prep GRE Strategy Guides, like sorting words into groups, sharing words through social media, and labeling items or rooms in your house. But here are other ways you might learn vocabulary — some weirder than others.

1. Replace words in songs you know. Music is a great learning tool because it contains sets of words that we already have memorized. When your vocabulary words offer up a synonym, try to think of a song you know that features that word, and just swap in your GRE word. If you aren’t that into songs, you can do the same thing with famous quotes.

2. YouTube video-search the word. Sometimes, hearing a word in context can really make it stick. Try doing a YouTube search for the word you have in mind. A YouTube search for inchoate makes me aware of the phrase inchoate crimes, which I can hear in context and internalize. A search for laud reveals a number of songs containing the word. The list goes on!

3. Take your flashcards to the gym. The repetition of many fitness activities, from running on the treadmill to doing push-ups, makes them perfect for studying vocabulary. Plus, with your body moving, your brain is better activated. I like to pick a word at a time and repeat it, with its various definitions, 10 or 20 times along with my movements. After the first read, try doing the rest of the repetitions from memory.

4. Put a face or motion with each word. Some people learn kinetically, and most of us benefit from learning in more than one way. Reading, writing, listening, and speaking are the four classic ways to learn language, but adding in motion and other sensory learning methods can really help. Associating a word with a grimace, a disgusted face, a sigh, a huge smile, a growl, a sly look, or a jump into the air can help cement its meaning in a way that memorization can’t. Try it!

5. Use Google Images search to “picture” words. A general Google search is of course a great learning tool, but don’t forget about Google Images. An image may stick in your mind in a way that words don’t. Image-search a word such as lavish or luminous, and it will stick with you. You can even print out an image that really helps you and put it on your flashcard—for this test, that’s often definition enough.

6. Color-code or sticker your flashcards or notes. Sometimes you come across a word on the GRE that you know you knew. Once upon a time, you read and defined the word, but it’s not cemented in your memory. In those cases, even a glimmer of the word’s meaning can make a difference. Think about putting all the “bad” words in red and all the “good” words in green. Or putting smiley-face stickers on all the words that define something positive or pleasant. At any convenience store, you can buy a pack of round label stickers in red, green, yellow, and blue—why not assign those colors to mean bad, good, happy, and sad?

7. Match a stack of words to a collection of items. For me, forcing vocabulary words into categories helps me to understand them. It makes me tell a story, which causes me to think about the word in a new way. Sorting words is one great way to do this. But for a different take, try taking a collection of items and assigning each word to one of the items. This might mean you dump out a box of crayons or the contents of your spice rack, and then force yourself to assign each vocabulary word to one of those items for whatever reason you can come up with! The collection doesn’t have to be physical items—it could be your list of Facebook friends or the contacts in your phone. Searching your mind for qualities that each word’s definition shares in common with an item or person in the collection helps form connections that stay with you.

8. Write the word in a way that shows its definition. Writing is often neglected as a learning tool, especially with more students printing or buying pre-made flashcards than ever before. But if you’re stuck on a word, try writing or doodling it in a way that mixes the word with the meaning. Maybe you turn the “o” in loquacious into an open mouth, talking and talking. Maybe you write the word lethargic long and melting along the bottom the page, or the word inimical covered in spikes.

9. Label a magazine or newspaper with vocabulary words. Whether you print your trouble words on actual labels or just crack open a magazine with a pen, try putting those words on other words, images, or ads that evoke the correct meaning. When you go through the process of searching for words or images that match the word and meaning you have in mind, you are actively using the words and their definitions—and that’s the best way to long-term memory!

10. Post your top-ten hit list where you’ll see it. Despite all the unique, multifaceted ways you find to study vocabulary, there will probably be some words that elude them. Pick ten of the worst offenders, and give them each a one-word definition. Then, put those words and their definitions on a Post-it note, and put that note somewhere you can see it. Sticking it on the bathroom mirror and reviewing it while you brush your teeth is a great option, or posting it by your computer at work. Once you feel you’ve mastered those words, make another hit list. Short, manageable chunks and lots of repetition are key.

If you have other ways that have helped you learn vocabulary, please share them with us! ?

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