B-Schooled Podcast Episode #299: GRE Vocabulary Prep

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length. Timestamps refer to the audio.

Announcer: [00:04] Welcome to B-Schooled, a podcast by Stacy Blackman Consulting, bringing you insights, tips, and advice about all aspects of the MBA admissions process and business school experience. And now, here’s your host: social impact CEO, Stanford GSB alum, and MBA admissions consultant, Chandler Arnold.

Chandler: [00:29] Hi, everyone. I’m Chandler Arnold, and I’m so happy to welcome Anthony Ritz, a member of the SBC team who specializes in working with applicants on test prep for both the GMAT and the GRE. Some of you might remember Anthony from a great podcast he did with Erika a few months ago. Anthony, welcome. We’re so happy to have you back on the show.

Anthony: [00:53] Hi, Chandler. It’s great to be here, and I’m really happy to be back on the podcast. I had a lot of fun last time with Erika, and it was great to hear from listeners that we were able to offer useful insights into what we do with test prep.

Chandler: [01:06] There are so many aspects of test prep we could talk about, and I can tell you from personal experience that my own clients sometimes aren’t even sure where to start, or how they might work with someone focused specifically on test prep. So today, I’m wondering if you might dive deep into just one area of test prep that you work on with applicants. GRE vocabulary is a great example, both because listeners will be able to leave this podcast with specific tips and suggestions, and because I think it gives you a framework to show how you can dive deep into any specific area and drive real results. Does that make sense?

Anthony: [01:53] Yeah, that sounds great, and I think GRE vocabulary is the perfect topic. It’s something that basically everyone taking the GRE, myself included, could stand to improve, and I’ve found that a lot of students are pretty unsure about how to do that in a systematic and effective way.

Chandler: [02:08] That sounds great. Or superlative, rather, to use a GRE vocab word. Where should we begin?

Anthony: [02:14] One of my strongest recommendations for anyone preparing for the GRE is to make a word journal. Basically, you make a list. It can be on paper, in a Word document, or in a spreadsheet. Wherever you see or hear a word you don’t know, you write it down. And in your word journal, you include its definition, an example sentence or maybe several example sentences using the word, a handful of synonyms, and maybe some etymology: roots, prefixes, suffixes, anything else relevant to the word.

Chandler: [02:54] I imagine this is useful for anyone taking the GRE, whether or not English is their first language. Is there anything about a word journal that people tend to overlook?

Anthony: [03:03] Yeah. It’s really important to make a word journal, but of all the things that go in there, the one students underestimate most is the value of synonyms. For a lot of words, there are multiple good synonyms, and you want to write down several. When you do, you sketch the boundaries of a word’s meaning and give it the texture and nuance that can be so important to using the word with the right connotations.

Synonyms can also help your recall. You might think, I don’t quite remember what this word means, but I recall that it’s connected to this and that other word, and I know what those mean. And in that way, you figure it out. Beyond that, another huge reason synonyms are key is that the GRE directly tests and asks about them across multiple question types.

Chandler: [03:54] That’s definitely true. Can you tell our listeners more about this?

Anthony: [03:58] Absolutely. The most obvious is sentence equivalence, where you’re asked to pick two words that both work in the sentence and that both mean basically the same thing, so they function as synonyms, or at least near synonyms. If you’ve been learning words in these related clusters, those will just jump out at you as you go through the answer choices. There are also word replacement or definition questions, and reading comprehension is the same idea. Your replacement word needs to work in the sentence, but it also needs to mean the same thing the original word meant.

Chandler: [04:33] I gotcha. But what if the synonyms aren’t words I already know?

Anthony: [04:40] Oh, wow, I almost forgot the best part. When you learn a word and go through its synonyms, if you don’t know some of those, you get to learn those words too. You go down the rabbit hole and get a ton of connected learning from one word you initially didn’t know, and it tends to be relatively sticky and easy to remember. It’s like when you look up a topic on Wikipedia and click an interesting link, and then another, and then another, and you look up and it’s two hours later and you’re reading about, I don’t know, Batman or something, and you think, how did I even get here?

But with the words, you have the full trail of connections in your journal. You know how you got there. You can see all of them. So when I look at a student’s word journal, I can tell if they’re doing this the way they should, because if they are, I’ll see these little clusters of related words one after another. And that’s great.

Chandler: [05:35] Okay, I hear you. So if synonyms are so important, what about antonyms? I noticed you didn’t mention including those.

Anthony: [05:45] Yeah, I’m not actually that big a fan of looking at antonyms at all. I know some people like to include them, but the problem is that a lot of studies show that when we remember information, we don’t always retain every aspect of it equally well. So if you learn antonyms, you may remember that two words are associated, but if you don’t remember the exact nature of the relationship, you end up confusing antonyms for synonyms. And that’s a pretty big downer when it happens.

So learning antonyms can actually be counterproductive. The upside is also more limited. It doesn’t have the built-in question types that synonyms do with sentence equivalence. On balance, I just don’t think it’s worth looking at antonyms or having them in your journal at all.

Chandler: [06:38] Gotcha. Well, let’s talk about root words for a second. When I was in high school, we did a unit called The Word Within the Word that focused mostly on Latin and Greek roots. I still remember learning roots like anti, bi, bel, inter, and equi, among many others. I always found it really helpful, because even if I came across a word I’d never heard before, take antebellum, for example, if I knew that ante meant before and bel meant war, I could make a pretty strong guess that antebellum meant something like before the war. What are your thoughts on studying root words?

Anthony: [07:23] Antebellum is a great word. I love how you can get almost the whole meaning just from those building blocks. And then you can take those same pieces and reconstitute them into other words. You can use that same bel-means-war idea to get bellicose, or belligerent, or rebellion. Or you can take ante to make antipasto, which is before the pasta. Well, technically before the food, but close enough.

Chandler: Yeah, exactly.

Anthony: Or antediluvian, a word that means before the deluge, the flood. In this case, we’re talking about the biblical flood, so antediluvian is a fancy way of saying really, really old. It’s a great insult, too. “Wow, that geezer wasn’t just old, he was positively antediluvian.” That’s what my students say about me. So roots, prefixes, and suffixes, all those building blocks of words help you add depth that makes your words much more memorable.

They help you draw connections, so you learn one word but get to know a bunch more as a bonus. And they can even help multilingual learners connect to words in other languages, especially other Latin- and Greek-based languages like Spanish, French, or Italian, that use the same elements. Not every word has an interesting etymology and useful building blocks, but when they do, it’s absolutely worth including them in your learning.

Chandler: [08:50] I love it. Okay, let’s say you’ve made this word journal. What do you do with it? Is the point just to go through the exercise of writing the words down?

Anthony: [09:01] No. You add these words whenever you come across one you don’t know, but then you’re responsible for actually learning and really knowing all of them. Moving forward, you should quiz yourself, or even better, get someone to quiz you. That means going back to the word journal at least on a weekly basis. You flip through, grab random words, and test whether you really know the meanings with all the nuance they entail. If you don’t nail some words, you flag them, relearn them, and prioritize them the next time you go through the journal.

Chandler: [09:36] So once we get a word right on a quiz, can we cross it off?

Anthony: [09:40] It’s important to keep quizzing this way even for words you already sort of know. First, because a lot of studies show that spaced-out reinforcement of concepts leads to better learning. And there are also studies showing that people’s self-judgment often overestimates how well they’ve learned something. You think you’ve got it, but you probably need to keep repeating even a little past that point to truly have it down. You can certainly deprioritize words once you get them right. You can hit them a little less often. But it’s still a good idea to touch them all at least once in a while.

Chandler: [10:21] Okay. Where should I find these words in the first place? Do you recommend a particular test prep company’s word list, or anything like that?

Anthony: [10:31] Honestly, pretty much every tutoring company out there has a GRE vocabulary list, and they’re basically all fine. Word lists are inherently hard to mess up too badly, so it’s fine to use one from any company you like. But even if you have a pre-made word list, that’s only a start. For one thing, you probably need to add more depth to most of them: synonyms, roots, more example sentences. They usually don’t give you much more than a definition for each word.

You should also be writing down words beyond the ones in whatever pre-made list you use. Words you see on practice questions and practice tests, anywhere you don’t know one, write it down. Words that come up in your day-to-day life, in conversations or at work, same thing. And words you see when you read.

By the way, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this yet, but you should definitely be reading at a high level. Reading at a high level on a regular basis is a major part of improving your reading comprehension for any standardized test, not to mention a basic life skill. So you should be reading regularly, and if you never see words you don’t know in what you read, you probably need to find harder material. Then you should be writing those words down and learning them.

Chandler: [11:54] Totally. I remember getting the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times while I was doing my test prep. It was a great way to learn about current events and also push myself in the vocabulary category. On that note, what about flashcards? I’ve seen a lot of companies selling those as a way to learn words. Should people buy those? Should they make their own? What’s your take?

Anthony: [12:21] I personally find flashcards tedious, to be honest. Whenever I’ve tried to do them, I just sort of don’t. So it’s not something I push my students toward, because I don’t believe in asking them to take approaches I haven’t found effective firsthand. That said, I know some students love flashcards, and if you’re one of them, that’s fine.

There’s not much difference between words in a single journal and words in a little stack of cards, as long as you’re getting the same sorts of information about each word: synonyms, example sentences, roots, and all of that. And as long as you’re studying and reviewing the words in similar ways. So if you want to use flashcards, it’s like I said about pre-made word lists. It’s fine to use any company’s product as a baseline, but then you ought to pick and choose the words that aren’t already second nature for you, and you ought to keep supplementing them with additional GRE-type words you run across elsewhere.

Chandler: [13:24] This all sounds great. I’m also reminded that test prep takes time. Not that I’m afraid of hard work or spending time, mind you. But I want to help our listeners get a sense of what they can anticipate learning between now and their test date. How many words do you think a student needs to learn for the GRE? I suppose that depends on where they’re starting. And how many words can someone realistically learn per day?

Anthony: [13:59] Those are a bunch of great questions. I’ll start with the per-day question. I’ve seen a lot of different opinions on this, and it really depends who you ask. My view is that 10 to 20 words per day is probably about the limit for most people. Journaling takes time, and it’s really important to me that you spend enough time on each word to really learn it, rather than rushing for quantity over quality.

So when people say, “Oh, I learned 50 words today,” I really wonder how much they’re getting out of that, how much they’re retaining, how many aspects of the word they’re capturing, and whether they’re really doing it the right way. I’d rather you do 10 to 20 words per day. As you get further along, you’re also going to need more time to review the words you’ve already learned. If you’re really doing all the work on each word, you’re not doing it in 10 seconds, or 30 seconds, or even a minute. So don’t push for a crazy, unrealistic pace. 10 to 20 words per day is plenty.

Now, as for overall vocabulary for the GRE, a few people may just need a tiny handful of words. But for most of us, it’s going to be at least a few hundred, maybe 300 to 500, give or take. On the higher end, maybe even over 1,000. It could get close to 2,000 for the few students with really weak English vocabularies. If English isn’t your first language and you’re not yet a strong speaker, you might need as many as a couple thousand. But again, for most people it ranges from a few hundred up to about 1,000 words.

Either way, you should definitely not try to cram this into the last week or two of your prep. It’s not going to work. It should be part of your process from the beginning. And the good news is that even at 10 to 20 words per day, if you start early, you can learn all the words you need, hundreds or more, in just a few months of steady progress.

Chandler: [16:01] I think that last part is super important, Anthony. People can get intimidated taking these tests for all kinds of reasons, and if someone thinks they’re weaker at this, the thought of learning 1,000 words can be daunting. But I love what you said. It’s a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race mentality. Learn 10 words a day, and before you know it, that 10 becomes 100, 200, 300. That’s great advice. Last question, and this one’s in the fun category: do you have any favorite bits of vocabulary?

Anthony: [16:39] Oh, man, there are so many wonderful words. You mentioned antebellum before, and that’s a great one. Let’s see, what else? I also love anachronism. Ana is a prefix that means either backwards or above in Greek, and chron is the Greek word for time, so anachronism is something out of place in time. It’s basically every joke in The Flintstones. Oh, ha ha, that caveman is riding a dinosaur to his office job. By the way, the Latin word for time is tempo, so you see a lot of pairs of chron words and tempo words that are synonyms, like contemporaneous and synchronous, which both basically mean at the same time.

Another word I love is ambivalent. Anyone who’s ambidextrous can tell you that ambi means both, and valence is an attraction or attachment. People like to claim that ambivalence is the same as indifference, but actually they’re opposites. Someone who’s indifferent has no attachments, so they just don’t care. It makes no difference to them. But someone who’s ambivalent cares too much. Sure, they’re on the fence, but their problem is that they’re drawn to both sides, so they’re torn.

Chandler: [17:53] I love it. Antebellum, anachronism, ambivalent, and we’re not even out of the A’s yet.

Anthony: [18:01] Okay, let me jump ahead. How about iconoclasm? Icon means what it sounds like, an image, and clasm means breaking. So originally, an iconoclast was literally a breaker of religious images. The first iconoclasts were the church, who would come into new areas, convert the natives, find their religious idols, smash them, and break their faith in the old gods. But then later, once the church was hegemonic, another great GRE word, go look it up, the iconoclasts were the people who went against the church. Nowadays, an iconoclast is simply anyone who challenges or attacks other people’s religious or otherwise cherished beliefs or institutions.

Then there’s a fun little cluster of words around talking a lot. Garrulous, verbose, prolix, loquacious, and so on. By the way, the last of those, loquacious, has the root loqu that you see quite often. Loqu and voc both mean speaking, and they show up in GRE words ranging from circumlocutory to grandiloquent to eloquent to equivocal to convoke to vociferous. And then there’s a whole other little cluster of words around not talking very much at all. Taciturn, reticent, laconic, elliptical. I don’t have very much to say about this.

So I don’t know if I can choose a single favorite word. But I do have a least favorite word.

Chandler: Okay, what is that?

Anthony: [19:35] A lot of people say the worst word in the English language is moist, and I think we can all agree that moist is an icky word. But I doubt the word moist has ever actually killed anyone. My least favorite word is inflammable. See, the prefix in usually means not. But then sometimes, every once in a while, in means very. And you just know that at some point in history, there had to be a couple of guys standing next to some big chemical tanks. One of them goes to light a cigarette, and the other says, “Now wait a minute, man, those chemicals could be flammable.” And the first one goes, “Nah, bro, it’s fine. It says right here that they’re inflammable.” And then, boom, it’s over for them. So learn vocabulary, kids. It might just save your life.

Chandler: [20:33] Anthony, that’s a great example of the power of vocabulary. For that and so many other reasons, I’m so happy we could have you back again. Thanks for joining us.

Anthony: [20:46] Thank you so much for having me, Chandler. It’s been a pleasure speaking with all the listeners out there today, and I hope I get a chance to do it again soon. Happy word journaling, everyone.

Chandler: [20:56] In closing, I’m really enjoying that I get to quote fashion, business, and academic icon Tim Gunn, who himself has a fantastic vocabulary. Tim wrote that few activities are as delightful as learning new vocabulary. I don’t know how many people would generally think of GRE prep as delightful, but with Anthony’s guidance, hopefully it will be. Thanks to everyone for joining us today, and best of luck in your test prep and in all the work you’re doing on your MBA journey.