I finally bent to the idea that my vocabulary might best be enhanced by flash cards. I hear this is how people learned vocabulary words back in the day, but let’s just say that my attempt at learning Spanish required more creativity than flashcarditivity and that I genuinely do not remember vocab flash cards for English words.
One of the words is “chary.” Chary means wary. Since these two words rhyme, when I made the cards on Friday, I thought, ‘Simple. Count it as a word I know!’
Then a weekend went by in which I did no studying whatsoever. Today, alone on the floor in my building, I’ve obviously been using my time wisely and taking pretests and flipping randomly through my flash cards.
“Chary” came up. My brain said, “Alas! A word you know!” Then my brain said, ‘Wait. You simply know you had a way to remember the word. What was it?’
So my poor neurons and synapses fired weakly at one another until one succumbed to the idea that “chary” obviously means “hairy” and voila. My GRE score just lost 100 points for a bad memory device.
This is going great.
