Strategies in Defining Vocab You've Never Seen Before?

Mariolee · August 13, 2011, 2:00am

Hey guys, I just wanted to know; since simply memorizing gigantic vocabulary lists with the high chance that the words you studied aren't even going to be on the test, I started wondering if there was a simpler solution.

I started looking at parts of words: prefixes, suffixes, etc. From there, I looked at the choices they give me in the SAT questions, and try to discern their meaning from those parts. It's a bit like in the film Akeelah and the Bee (I think that's what it was called) where Morphius teaches Akeelah how to spell difficult words by understanding the different parts of them.

Do any of you have strategies in studying or defining vocab for the SAT?

Mariolee · August 13, 2011, 4:17pm

No, just me? There has to be a more efficient studying method for the vocab than just rote memorization of vocab lists.

WriterColumbia · August 13, 2011, 7:17pm

I wish but seems like there aren't any other strategies besides that which is bad for those (us) who aren't built like computers and hate memorizing :/

LoseYourself · August 13, 2011, 9:02pm

Other than basic prefixes (re-, anti-, pro-), you don't need anything else.

LilBallerx8 · August 13, 2011, 9:22pm

It's cool to do that, the problem is that English is such a annoying language that there are exceptions to EVERY fcking rule, including exceptions to the prefixes and suffixes.

IceQube · August 13, 2011, 9:28pm

I don't define words on sentence completion questions with unfamiliar words. Well, at least I don't define them when taking the test.

What I do is eliminate all the wrong choices with the knowledge I already have. That usually leaves me with 2-3 to choose from.

This, coupled with my knowledge of words, gets me 99.9% of the SCs right.

Of course, I always define all the unfamiliar words after a test.

jadelotus · August 14, 2011, 10:53pm

I do what you describe as well. I usually look at pieces of words.

Using salubrious as an example, I'd proboably think of "salud" which is health in Spanish and take a guess. In that case, I'd be right since "salubrious" means promoting health or favorable to health.

Consanguineous is another example. "Con" is together, with and "sanguis" is blood. Consanguineous is sharing the same ancestor, so again, this makes sense.

However, some words are absoloutely beyond guessing. Take "loquacious". I suppose if you were a latin student you may know, but the latin root "loquax" only has two English counterparts, and it's unlikely. So as far as strategy, I usually just try to see if the word (or parts of it) reminds me of any other familiar words in either English or Spanish.

My strategy is going to be to learn a decent number of roots, than go after one of the gigantic lists so that I have a smaller number I need to use rote memorization for.