<p>so i'm chinese, i've only been to the US for a little over 2 years, my speaking is okay, but my writing and reading sucks. i'm going to be a junior in high school this fall, and about to take the PSAt and preparing for SAT. i have a lot of trouble preparing for those. I have a lot of SAT books, but my problem is i don't know A LOT of vocabularies, so when I tried to read those books, i don't understand them. and i was wondering if i am suppose to study all those SAT vocabs 1st, and then study the books?? but i'm afraid that by the time i finished all those vocabs, i wouldn't have time left. so what should i do? which one should I study first??? any suggestions?</p>
<p>First off, for the SAT, don't learn vocab, learn prefixes (things at the beginning of a word, like non, bi, mis, etc.), roots (aqua means water, anthro means man) and suffixes (things at the end of words). You can figure out the meanings of lots of words this way without memorizing the definitions. Basically, study the books first, since it's more important to know how to take the test than to know the information on the test.</p>
<p>Secondly, since you have only been in the country for a small amount of time, colleges will let you take the TOEFL (test of english as a foreign language) and look at that instead of the reading/writing of the SAT. The TOEFL is much easier than the SAT for people learning English, so you should do much better.</p>