About three years back I decided to give GRE to have the option of MS open. It was a busy period for me at work and I could give myself just three weeks to prepare. In such circumstances I was forced to find ways of learning words faster. I want to describe here the various techniques I tried and how I think they helped me. My final score was 1530 (730 vocab + 800 Quant) which was far from best but still very good.
The main technique is actually very simple, it is called repetitions or iterations. You need to go through the word lists many many times. You don't have to be able to learn all the words in one iteration but just give each word a short period of attention. In this short span of time try to relate to the word as much as possible but don't strain yourself into trying to remember the word in that one go. Human mind works in mysterious ways. It remembers things that repeat themselves over a period of time better than things that repeat multiple times in very short period, say minutes. So what you need to do is to spend less time each iteration but increase the number of iterations.
A smart variation in this technique that I tried was that after a few iterations I would try to check whether I remember the meaning of a word or not. The ones I didn't remember, I put a check mark in front of. After a couple more iterations I became pretty sure that I remembered the unmarked words well so I started going over just the marked words. After couple such iterations I started marking again the words that I still did not remember and so on and so forth. At the end I had words with five to six ticks and ultimately I remembered all the words in Barrons.
Like everyone else I created index cards to remember words. These cards help use spare time to remember the words e.g. while in a lift or waiting for your turn at an ATM machine. Also it helps your mind relate to words. Minds likes variety, when you look at a word on a card it puts that snapshot in memory. You won't remember the snapshot exactly but you will remember the word and you will almost feel that the snapshot is there somewhere in memory.
I also tried pretty hard to find audio recording of words and meaning as I didn't have any good audio recording equipment to do so myself plus I don't know the right pronunciations for many of these words. I was pleasantly surprised to find exactly such audio tapes by an Indian named Kripa Shankar. They didn't cover all the words but just the main ones, but they were a great help. Audio is a great way of learning and provides another dimension to your memory. Another good thing with audio tapes is that you can listen to them while driving which takes around an hour for me every day.
My friend Chaitanya gave me a bunch of softwares to help learn words. One of them was called voca.exe. I don't know if I still have it somewhere. This software will keep asking you multiple choice questions around word meanings or antonyms; exactly the thing that you want.
Barrons covers most of the words but it is usually a good idea to have an additional source. I tried “All About Words” but it was too difficult and I didn't have much time so I used another off the shelf book called improve you vocabulary in 6 weeks. Again greater variety in learning helped.
I tried to create mnemonics for the most difficult words. It would have been great if some book had pre-created mnemonics for words. I found one such book on Amazon but they didn't publish in India and there wasn't enough time for shipment.
Once when my brother and his friends visited me I asked them to question me on word meanings using Barrons. This is a very common way of learning in India and very effective. Unfortunately they had to leave in a day so I couldn't use this technique as much as I would have liked to.
I have tried to list the techniques in the order that I think helped me but of course it will vary from person to person.
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