GRE考神写的单词记忆心得

来源： 2019-05-21 12:56中

One of my best friend in university used to prepare for Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) since he wanted to go to US to do master’s. The amount of vocabulary required to excel in the test is around 20,000 and at the time the vocabulary of Chinese students like us was something around 6000 (and that is If we ever had some extra time getting exposure to English outside school). To fill in this gap, he would do what most people do when studying language – look at the translation of the words or phrases and memorize it. The mindset was quite simple and straightforward: If he could memorize all of the translations by heart, he would have acquired the amount of vocabulary to understand everything in the examination. As hard-working as Chinese can be, he spent 3 months waking up at 6 in the morning, memorizing 500 words and their translations, forgetting 95% of the words he’d done by the night and as a believer of Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve and spaced repetition, repeating the whole process the next day. He did okay in the examination. But what he told me after the exam was that during the exam he didn’t recognize most of the words he’d memorized in that 3 months. Some of the words he recognized were mostly from the vocabulary he’d memorized the day before the exam which apparently is due to the benefit of short-term memory.

I have long since ditched the traditional approach to learning words by memorizing translations. Although I still look at the direct English explanation of the words, I don’t give much credit to that either when I learn words. So how do I learn it? Using pictures, sounds and flashcards, spaced repetition… These are all effective approaches and the kind of stages I have gone through. I’ll write in another post about these methods and my analysis of them. But what I regard as essential in genuinely understanding a word is ‘context’.

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