Out of the 2000 words in the dictionary, I know 1000 pretty well. But now I have a week to memorize the other 1000.
Judging from simulation exams I did, this is my main problem. In the English and Maths parts I make at worse 2-4 mistakes(out of 50-54 questions), which keeps me in the highest score percentile or only a bit below, but in the verbal(Hebrew) part, which has 60 questions, aproximately 30% of the questions are vocabulary based. Those questions can kick me out of the highest 5%, which will make life very very complicated.
The vocabulary consists of “Hebrewized” English words(easy, but they are rarely asked), some Aramaic expressions and Hebrew words that no sane person can possibly know.
I’m having problems with the Hebrew words part. Most of them are just impossible to remember.
Some of them are similar to normal Hebrew words with close meaning, but many are just a meaningless collection of syllables…
Etymology, friend. All in the word origins. Well, a lot of it.
Also, take it slow. Learn one. Then two. Five. Ten.
Go back to the first one. Then do the first five again. Then do the next five.
Back to the first one. Then learn another five.
Now you know fifteen.
And then you know twenty.
Go back and do the first five again. Then the second five.
By now you might be finding patterns in the words that you can use to remember differences and meaning. All I can do is give you English examples … “procrastinate” is made up of Pro, cras, and a form of the latin verb tenere, to hold. Pro=for, cras=tomorrow. Pro-cras-Tenere. To hold for tomorrow.
And what do you do when you procrastinate? You hold off on doing something until later (usually, actually, a day or so after it was due;)).
My brother, in memorizing Pi to 400 places, started out with the first five digits. When I was memorizing the elements, it took about a half hour to get past “hydrogen helium lithium beryllium boron carbon nitrogen oxygen fluorine neon”
A day, if that, later, I was doing the lanthanides and those unullellium ones.
Ah, Eli, achi. I know what you’re going through. I was in the same situation as you - a month before the test I knew maybe a third of the Hi-Q dictionary. What I did was this:
I took a simple, small notebook. I went over the list and every word I didn’t know I copied over, with the word on the right, its meaning on the left. Then I started memorizing them, page bny page. After I memorized a page, I’d cover the right side with my hand and test myself, but without lingering too long on stuff I didn’t know. Afterwards, I’d go to the beginning of the book and test myself on everything I’d learned up to that point.
I’d do this with every page - memorize, test and then test from the beginning. I must have gone over the first page of that notebook 100 times. By the end, I had nearly the entire list memorized.
As for individual words… some I just learned by heart, but for most of them I used tricks. Rhymes worked, as did etymology and free-association: for instance, “madmena” is an obscure Hebrew word for “garbage dump”. Now, madmena has the same root as Dimona (a city in southern Israel), which is - let’s face it - not the hottest place in the country to live. The link was pretty obvious, and I never forgot the word.