Barron vocab list

Test Preparation
1

<p>is memorizing all the words on barron's vocab list a good way to prepare for the GRE? This is the list <a href="http://www.onestopgre.com/vocabulary-list/downloads/barron-vocabulary.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.onestopgre.com/vocabulary-list/downloads/barron-vocabulary.pdf&lt;/a>. it has about 4800 words.</p>

<p>also are there a lot of redundant words? Like lubidinous (lustful) or arboreal (treelike) I honestly can't see those 2 words ever showing up on the gre, but I have never taken the test or a practice so I wouldn't know. What do you guys think?</p>

2

<p>I prepared with the help of that, and that was the single biggest factor that helped me get a high verbal score.
The words on the list may seem unnecessary at times, but they do really show up on the GRE. On test day I noticed that several words on the verbal section were ones that I had studied from the vocab list.</p>

3

<p>I hope “several words” is an understatement.</p>

4

<p>OP: I think you meant libidinous.</p>

5

<p>Learning the vocab that most shows up on the test is a great idea. I went through the whole list (different prep book), circled the words I did not know, and made flash cards for those words. I had those cards with me wherever I went for about a month. Studied on subway, in waiting rooms, etc. whenever I had time I’d otherwise be killing. When I took the GRE, nine of the words I had learned showed up in the questions, and my good score was in part a result of that targeted study.</p>

6

<p>@snarlaton, are you being sarcastic? only 9 words showed up???</p>

7

<p>^Remember that this is an exam with maybe 75 words per section through sentence completion and sentence equivalence. So with that in mind, knowing 9 more of them than you did before sounds really good. I was fine looking over a few hundred words in the Princeton book, but my passive vocabulary was already sufficient for a test like this (libidinous and arboreal are words that I don’t have to think twice about, for instance). In the end, having a larger vocabulary won’t hurt your score and would probably raise it to an extent, but learning all 4800 words on that list wouldn’t be easy (even if you know ~85% of the words on it already).</p>

8

<p>What I’m doing is memorizing 40 words a week. I got 2+ years before I take it. But if only like 9 words show up out of 75, how do you learn the other 66? I meaning memorizing 4800 words thats hundreds if not thousands of hours just to learn 9 words. just thinking about that makes me angry and depressed</p>

9

<p>You’ll know some of the words already. In the end, odds are you won’t know every word, either. I got lucky. I didn’t know about 600 of the Barron’s words, after all.</p>

10

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<p>Knowing those words allowed me to get 9 questions absolutely right that I otherwise would have guessed on.</p>

<p>These were words on my “needed to learn” list, not out of the whole list of often-tested words.</p>