How to Remember the Words: (PART ONE)

Become actively receptive to new words. Every time you read, there are opportunities to
increase your vocabulary. Don't ignore these opportunities. Many of us tend to skip unknown
words and gain general understandings of phrases or paragraphs from their overall context. If
you're used to doing this, it may require additional effort to remember to note down the unknown
words. Train yourself to be invariably aware when reading and listening to others, and
remember the words that are not known to you. Look them up later in a dictionary.

Read more. Once you leave school, you won't get new word drills and reading will become a
cornerstone of building your vocabulary repertoire. As well as aiming to read well
written magazines, essays, and Online material, read as many books as you have time and
inclination for. Seek out the tomes of Dickens, Austen, and Hawthorne. Deliberately find books
that are hard to read such as William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and James
Joyce's Ulysses.

 Try nonfiction and technical books: these will rapidly teach you not only new ways to
speak, but also new ways to think.
 If your reading today is largely restricted only to the quick perusal of daily newspapers,
then change your habits. Try the long, difficult stories in national, international and business
newspapers and magazines, especially the columnists' blogs. A magazine such as the
Economist or Time is a great option where few newspapers are available because a
subscription can be mailed anywhere...economically. Also try to read at least one book and
several magazines every week. Not just this week and the next week, but every week for a long
time. As well as improving your vocabulary, you'll also keep updated and backdated, your
general knowledge will increase, and you'll be a well-rounded person who knows a lot more
than many other people do.

Add the new words you meet in your reading to your own vocabulary. When you see an
unfamiliar word in a book, magazine, manual, etc., do not skip over it impatiently. Instead,
pause for a moment and say it to yourself. Get used to its sound and its appearance. At first, try
to puzzle out its possible meaning in the context of the sentence. Whether you come to the right
conclusion or not, whether indeed you're even able to come to any intelligent conclusion at all is
of no importance. What is important is that, by that process, you're becoming
super conscious of the new word. As a result, you will suddenly notice that this very word pops
up unexpectedly again and again in all sorts of places. For now your mind has been alerted to
notice it. Once you've tried this exercise, look it up in the dictionary and confirm its meaning.
After you've seen each newly learned word a few times, you will know fairly accurately not only
what it means but the many ways in which it can be used; best of all, it'll now form a part of your
natural vocabulary.

Read the dictionary. Expanding your vocabulary will always be improved by regularly diving
into the dictionary and reading entries for words you aren't yet familiar with. This requires the
ownership of a quality dictionary to make it more interesting, so look for a dictionary that has
lengthy explanations on the origins and uses of words, as these will go a long way to helping
you remember the word and enjoy using your dictionary.
 Sign up to be emailed a "Word of the Day" using one of the many online dictionaries.
You can also procure for yourself a Word of the Day calendar; be sure to read the word on the
page each day and aim to remember each day's word and even use it somewhere in your day.
 Visit word building sites such as freerice.com and construct an expansive vocabulary.
 There are many online sites devoted to compiling alphabetical lists of unusual, weird,
old-fashioned, and difficult words. Avail yourself of the search engine to find these sites and to
learn from them. This is a great way to while away time waiting for a bus or in the bank queue.
 Open your mind to new ideas. Every word you see is the translation of new idea. Think for few
minutes of the areas of human knowledge that may possibly be unknown to you - psychology,
semantics, anthropology, science, art, music, management, etc. Then, attack one of these
areas methodically, by reading books on that particular subject. In every field, from the simplest
to the most abstruse, there are several books for the average, untrained lay reader, right
through to those for experts in the field. Push yourself with the reading as far as you can, to
expose yourself to new ways of using the vocabulary and forming ideas; doing this will give you
both a good grasp of the subject and, at the same time, add new vocabularies to your existing
knowledge.

Set a goal. If you do nothing about your vocabulary, you will learn, at most, twenty-five to fifty
new words in the next twelve months. With a conscious effort, you can learn several thousands
of new words. Set yourself a goal of finding and remembering several new words every day.
While this may sound ambitious, you will discover as soon as you start actively looking for new
words in your reading, and actively doing reading of a more challenging type, that new words
are all around you and that this is an exciting goal to fulfill. And understand this – vocabulary
building snowballs. The results of each new day search will be greater and greater. Once you
provide the necessary initial push, once you gain momentum, once you become addicted to
looking for new words, for finding new words and for taking possession of new words, you'll find
you can't stop.

The next time somebody tells you that setting goals is really a lot of hype, tell him/her this. "If life
is a journey, how will you get there if you don’t have an itinerary? Goals tell you where you are
going, how you are going to get there, and what you will do when you get there". Decide what
you want. Goal setting is the opposite of floating through life letting things happen to you. If you
don't know what you want to achieve, be and succeed at in life, then you risk being open to
doing whatever others suggest. Setting goals requires you to make a decision about what you
actually want. Striving for those goals lets you achieve your known desires. And goal setting
requires setting a deadline, so that you don't waste precious time.

So Learning the Vocabularies might be difficult but you know it’s not impossible and with
Persistence and by being assiduous you can achieve your GOAL of Learning, Applying
and Remembering the GRE Vocabularies.

Make looking up 10 words in the dictionary a day a habit. Once that gets real simple start
looking up 20, 30, 40…

Read the newspapers every day. If you come across a word whose meaning is unknown to
you, underline it and look up the word in the dictionary. Try using the new words you have
learned in your daily conversation. Make it a habit. Start with a page a day, and in a while, your
vocabulary will be expanded.

Things You'll Need

 Dictionary
 Word cards and marker
 Notebook and marker
 Classic novels, difficult reads
 Wide range of reading material