GRE Vocab Capacity: 2017 Edition - Over 1300 Powerful Memory Tricks and Mnemonics Paperback – June 12, 2012

If you've been studying for the GRE, I'm sure you know that no one book is enough. I personally purchased 15+ study aides from Amazon and I can honestly say that this was the most helpful for strengthening my vocabulary and making the definitions "stick."The authors are extremely witty and come up with hilarious sentences that you will remember. (I took the GRE a month ago and I still think of this book's sentence for "assail" whenever I hear that word... I mean, it has the phrase "come at me, bro" in it. You'll never forget that.) I remember sitting at Starbucks and having people stare at me because I was laughing so hard while reading these sentences. I also remember thinking that studying for the GRE couldn't and shouldn't be this fun. But aside from its entertaining quality, the most important thing about this book is that its method actually works. I bought Manhattan's GRE flashcards--both the essential and advanced set--and I definitely recommend those as well (they're easy to carry around and study whenever you have a few free minutes in your busy schedule). But the problem for me was that there were some words that I could NOT remember, regardless of how many times I looked at the flashcard; the word just was not registering in my brain. That's where this book came into play. For those particularly difficult, why-do-I-not-know-this-even-though-I've-seen-it-a-million-times words, these mnemonic devices did the trick. Because the sentences are so unique/outlandish, they're not easily forgotten.In short, I highly recommend this book as part of a comprehensive set of study tools. You can either use it how I did (as described in the preceding paragraph), or you can use it right from the start by making flashcards for all the words or reading through the book and highlighting the ones you don't know.

For its functionality, this book is great. It's effective if you study it. There are many words the book includes that are in the GRE. Of course there are plenty of words in the GRE that are not in this book, but what this book does is it not only reduces the number of words that you won't know on the GRE, it also helps give you practice on how to create mnemonics to study more words on your own. Even if you get unlucky and find that none of the words you learned from this book appear on the actual GRE when you take it, at least you will have a better understanding of advanced vocabulary which may help you to figure out the meaning of a new unknown word by comparing its roots/similarities to a different word that you once learned. Your larger vocabulary will also help you to absorb more information as you read/study/watch TV so that will open your brain to be more receptive to other words you may have selectively tuned out due to not having understood the previous word in the same sentence that you would learn in this book.Mnemonics are vital for solid learning/memorization- we do it all the time without even knowing it. If we meet some person at a friend's house and all of a sudden there's a crash of thunder and someone screams, you will most likely remember that person much more vividly from then on, whereas you would have forgotten them completely had something out of the ordinary not happened that minute to heighten your senses and activate your frontal cortex.Anyway, this book really does have some great mnemonics in it that I would never have thought up. There are also some words whose mnemonics are 'meh' or hard to remember/easy to forget; but mostly this book is very well put together.I find it strange that there is no publisher information, no ISBN information, no index for quick reference- besides the pages of words and their mnemonics, the book is quite literally bare. There are actually a bunch of empty pages as well, I'm assuming as a place to write new words or practice, but it is a strange feeling to have such an anonymous-like book.

This book, by far, beats the usual vocabulary section of the study guides by the big companies. I've found that following their study guidelines provided in the beginning of this book I've retained this vocab much better. Going over vocab in other big company books is like reading a shortened dictionary, even if you make flash cards with their definitions. This book really helps with retention, it makes the process more fun, and sometimes the examples can be pretty funny!One warning about this product is a lot of the vocab examples might lean toward American culture. For example, my wife (not from this country) may not understand some of the examples provided in this book. Just as I may not understand the humor in a "funny" movie created in her country. A student could possibly find a work-around to this potential issue by creating their own examples of usage.In summary, after doing lots of work and retaining little from recommended vocab sections of the larger company GRE study guides, I've found this to be the best method. I hope the authors create a quant book!

Got a 169/170 on GRE after using this book to help study for vocab. Before this, my vocab was far from robust. There are definitely some definitions that appear to have been written by some dudes over a few beers - so I don't recommend for anyone who does not find occasional vulgarity funny. But if you are not sensitive to that, it's an amazing tool to help increase your vocab. You may end up replacing some of the definitions with your own - something that resonates well with you - but the concept of how to use these tricks to remember definitions of new words is a great mindset to get into and a great tool to use. My husband and I are still reviewing and using to increase our vocab after the test. And the book still makes me laugh out loud.

mnemonics are not too obvious for Indian applicants though it helps in framing your own mnemonics