<p>The only thing holding me back from getting a really high score in Critical Reading is the sentence completions. Now, I am aware of Grammatix’s method of how to approach these without memorizing thousands of words. But: I am a nonnative speaker, so i can’t really feel what a word means. i have the Kaplan RAP book that has 2200 words with sentences. Should I memorize them, and then move on to my Gruber’s 3400? This is the only way i can perfect my CR. Have any of you nonnative speakers done it without memorizing, and got the other methods to work?</p>
<p>Also, if you did memorize all those words, how did you do it, because I really don’t want to make 3,400 flash cards. help me…</p>
<p>I know this is a fairly discussed issue, but its more of a personal problem since English was not my first language.</p>
<p>akahmed: Grammatix’s approach is your best shot. Memorizing words is also hard for non-native speakers since they often get the context wrong. No matter which approach you take, it will be hard if you are a non-native speaker. I suggest you still with Grammatix. It takes some time, but you can certainly get it</p>
<p>So, have you tried using it and has it worked for you? I am questionable about it because it seams so uncertain, memorizing seems a bit more … solid</p>
<p>Remember the feel of a word is also the connotation you are getting from the sentence, meaning alot of the root words of hard completions are there in what the sentence is acutally saying(if that makes any sense).</p>
<p>Now after doing 100’s of completions,I realized basically the really hard ones have a root word that is almost universal to any language, maybe look at them that way, see if there is any similarity to any language you do know.</p>
<p>I googled ‘hongbaoshu’ and all the results looked like they were in chinese (wait… they were - the word seems to refer to the little red book by Mao).</p>
<p>Where exactly are we supposed to find this word list (preferably in english)?</p>
<p>Nonnative english speaker: Memorizing around 500-750 words from various sources and diverse readings worked passably for me. I raised my CR 51 score in PSAT to 700 on my practice BB tests.</p>
<p>I second. Nonnative speakers should definitely work on their vocabulary.
Mike would not suggest memorizing word lists, but admittedly it’s the fastest way.</p>
<p>When I first opened my Barron’s How to Prepare for The New SAT, I was deeply humiliated by my ignorance. I had about 20-30 unknown words in each medium-length passage, and yeah I understood nothing at all about “what the author implies” …w00t!!!</p>
<p>I memorized Barron’s high frequency word list, approximately 250 words and I suddenly found myself in the 500s. I was oblivious to the importance of vocabulary on the CR sections and I gave up memorizing and started looking for techniques, patterns and mysterious strategies that would help me improve; I never did improve. I took the '06 October SAT and got a filthy 590, only because of my poor vocabulary.</p>
<p>After conning the first 25 word lists(~1750 words), I took a CR section from CB’s online test and I scored a 730.(Aced a section; missed one on the other and missed 4 on a narrative-passage-including section)</p>
<p>I am now memorizing the last 5 word lists from Barron’s 3500 and have been scoring consistent 700s on ‘synthetic’ tests. The reason I’m not improving is that these tests lack standards and patters and are next to unpredictable. The way Kaplan reasons on question 5 is completely contradictory to the way Princeton Review reasons on question 8.</p>
help me…</p>
:(</p>