Somehow I’ve got to cram as many words as possible into my brain before the October 6th SAT. Earlier I wrote about using Pauker to aid me in remembering new words. Pauker works well, but it’s more of a help in testing than remembering.

At first I tried the time-tested idea of making sentences for the vocab words I had to remember. This, however, turned out to be a tedious waste of time. It was difficult to construct a sentence that intuitively made “sense” to me with just the dictionary definition. If I couldn’t somehow extract the abstract feeling behind the word, the word just never stayed in my brain.

After my first failure, I decided to just stick to repeated sessions of Pauker to force me to remember the words. I would begin a test on fresh vocab and the words I didn’t know after the first time trial would reappear in subsequent tests. Though the method worked (somewhat), it was very time-consuming, and time was something I definitely didn’t have to spare.

Through the repetition method, another issue popped up–these words stayed in my not-so-long term memory, which was about a week or two long, and definitely not enough for SATs. After the week-long period, I would have to really dig into my memory before I recalled even a vague definition of the word.

I also discovered that I’d never be able to remember the connotation of a word when I only had abridged dictionary definitions. For instance, the word “efface” showed up with a definition of “To rub or wipe out.” After checking out numerous uses of the word in context, I realized that no one was using the word the way I expected it to be used. In context, the word was often used in a way meaning “lowering oneself” or “being humble”. Not so surprisingly, a check on The Free Dictionary shows that “efface” can also mean “humble - cause to be unpretentious”.

The Free Dictionary check led me to try looking for words in context. The aforementioned dictionary turned out to be quite useful in the task–there was a section designated “References in classic literature,” perfect for locating the word in context.

Unfortunately, the more I used it, the more I found it to be a problem in itself. Because it was “classic” literature, something I’d overlooked at first, most of the words and sentence structures employed were already difficult to understand, so topping it off by trying to grasp the meaning of an unfamiliar word was impossible.

Then I decided to look for words in a context that I could better understand. I chose to Google “[theword] reddit” to find the words in Reddit comments. I tagged Reddit because I’d previously seen a lot of these words used in the comments there, and so I thought it would be a nice chance to scrounge for more. To use the “efface” example again, I dumped it in Google and received:

Right, nobody would compare Biden’s narcissism with Kucinich’s self-effacement. [teratomato]

and

paul graham is self-effacing compared to your typical smalltalker. [serudla]

Both of these somehow exemplified the second, more hidden definition of “efface”, so it was a nice supplement to my one or two-liner Barron’s definition.

More searches revealed that it was much easier to instantly grasp the contextual meaning behind the word. I’m guessing this has something to do with the way most comments are organized–they’re comments so they’re meant to be short and still make a clear point. If I were reading a long article, it would take a lot more reading before I could use my understanding of the context to figure out the word.

So far I like my method–I’ve been able to retain much more in a day than what I’ve been able to before in a week. I do suppose everyone has different methods though–that was just my journey to what worked for me.