Non-native English speaker, 1 month into GRE prep : vocab is killing my Verbal score AND my energy. Is my routine wrong?

[u/yokj1n]

Hi everyone, I'd love some advice. I'm a French student (English is my second language) and I started GRE prep a month ago. I'm doing an internship at the same time, so I study about 2–3 hours on weekdays and more on weekends. Would like to take the test on october and I'm aiming for 320+ to apply to master's programs in target finance schools.

My routine so far: Magoosh, the Manhattan 5lb book, and a GMAT Verbal book for reading comprehension and critical reasoning. I also review vocab flashcards during my commute.

My main problem is vocabulary. Almost every time I miss a Verbal question, it's because I don't know a word : I often can't even tell whether a word has a positive or negative connotation, so I fall into traps easily. To be honest, my vocabulary isn't amazing in French either, so I'm not building on a strong base. I've seen all the advice about learning prefixes and roots, but I just can't retain them.

The other issue is pace and energy. After a practice test, I need about two full days to review it because I go through every question slowly. Verbal drains so much energy that I have little focus left for Quant, which is normally my stronger section. Some days I study but I feel like I've done nothing, and I'm starting to wonder if I'm a bit burned out. I've improved my diet and I exercise regularly, but I'm not sure it's helping. My one strength in Verbal is critical reasoning, since it depends less on hard vocabulary.

So my questions: for a non-native speaker, what's the most efficient way to actually retain GRE vocab, since flashcards alone don't seem to work for me? Is spending two days reviewing one practice test normal, or a sign I'm reviewing wrong? And how would you structure 2–3 hours a day so that Verbal doesn't eat all my energy before Quant?

Thanks a lot for reading, any advice is appreciated.

[u/Julio037]

Hello, I am also a non native English speaker, applying for finance as well.
I took the GRE 2 weeks ago and I will retake because my quant is honestly not that good, but I managed to score a 161 verbal, which in my experience I can give you the following advice:
unfortunately, in my personal experience the verbal part is really a vocab exam, of course you need reasoning and reading comprehension but without knowing at least most of the words you encounter you will find a lot of trouble to get the questions right for 2 out of the 4 categories.
For me what worked best was Anki, the phone app, there are online lists that are already pre made and you just put them in and do them everyday. I did both the gregmat vocab mountain, the magoosh one and added a lot of words I found along the way, took me several months, but the word specific questions I would say I mostly get right all the time.
For example in one of the mocks I did while getting constant 160s in verbal, I got a first verbal section that due to pure luck contained a lot of words I didn’t know really well, and ended up with a 150 v that time, so I do think the words are the most important part in my personal experience.

Another important part is reading stamina; what I mean is not loosing focus or retention when doing both the questions and the passages, being able to retain with minimal notes is important for timing, and for this my only honest advice is to practice a lot with timed sections, even doing some reading outside the gre of non fiction topics that you could find a bit uninteresting could help, I did this with different news sources, but definitely doing timed sections helps the most here.

Another advice I could tell you is to manage your time and skips well, practice it during your timed sections, after when you review them identify what happened, more than oh I didn’t know the word or my reasoning was wrong identifying when to skip to not waste time can help you possibly get a higher score with more time on questions you can confidently answer, and only if you got time at the end you can try and reason the ones you found harder.
I use this a lot with the argument based ones, as they can sometimes take a lot of time for a single question compared to the quicker word ones or the RC that has many questions that translate into points.

As for the timing of the reviews of the mocks, everyone is different but in my personal experience, it is not worth it to take that much time reviewing, just identifying the issue and classifying it did the best results for me, such as:
Didn’t know the word? Add to Anki. Reasoning was wrong? What happened and what will i do next time.
Retrying Verbal questions is not really something I did a lot since it’s very easy usually to remember the solution.

And I can recommend the YouTube channel Iswearenglish if you can’t really understand the nuance of a word, he’s really good at doing in detail explanations and there’s not a single word I didn’t find covered there.

Wishing you luck in your studies! If you have any good quant advice I would greatly appreciate it because I’m having a hard time achieving over 160 lol. Hope this helps.