Learning words for the GRE

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Hello, major lurker here! This site has become a total haven for me and I finally have a reason to post. I'm studying for the GRE and finding it very difficult to memorize new words. Can anyone share either study tips or what worked for them?

For an idea of the problems I'm encountering... I've spent the past hour becoming better acquainted with about a dozen familiar words and learning one new word. The problem I have is that I can't memorize the word as a whole - I have to etymologically break it down and think of its evolution. That way, I can recognize each part of the word and put it together. This helps me in the long run because then I am better able to recognize new words. However... it takes forever. At the rate of a word per hour, I won't be getting anywhere anytime soon. Not to mention, I still have so much more to study for..

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

-Rina

Flashcards and Mnemonics work for me.
Good luck on your GRE

A technique that I have found useful for short-term, very quick, vocab memorization is to memorize words in blocks of four. So, say you have a stack of two dozen new words in front of you on flash cards. Take the first four words and go through them until you can remember all of them. Then take the next four, and memorize all of them, and so on, until you have gone through the entire stack. Now that you have learned them in chunks, shuffle the stack and go through the entire stack at once (if this is too much, use chunks again, but larger chunks, maybe divisions of 8 or 12). Set any words you miss off to the side, and when you are finished, go through them again, until you get them all.

Now obviously for the GRE, you want to get these into your long-term memory. And for this, you just need to keep using your flash cards on a regular basis. Introduce a new set each week, but continue to review the old ones.

If you want to use etymology, maybe include something about the word origin that you memorize alongside the definition.

I should say, I got into the 87th percentile of the verbal section of the old GRE using this tequnique, so it does work (also used the advice in the princeton review manual for techniques on how to answer verbal questions, it's very good). Math was another story, let's just say that none of the techniques I used for that section were able to compensate for my very low processing speed. . .