As the number of English vocabularies required by my English literature teacher is increasing, I am now confronting a great problem memorizing them in a short time. Simple words are okay to me, but it's especially difficult when I come across words with crazy suffixes and prefixes or with tricky interchangeable prefixes (such as proclaim, declaim, acclaim, reclaim, disclaim and exclaim).

Since I'm a clever guy (or I just made up :D), I found out a post somewhere written by a Chinese, which was upvoted to the top of the "English Learning" category, and therefore I read it carefully. This post greatly recommends folks to make use of word roots. The writer argues that it can help you spell it correctly, remember the accurate definition, and deal with multiple evolved meanings of a word.

Personally, most of my English vocabularies are remembered by rote memorization, which is, as I have experienced it in person, super inefficient. Since I am convinced by this post, I would like to change my out-of-date method into this new one and give it a shot. However, I would like to know more before I get started.

Thus, would you like to give me your perspective to this method and show off your personal way of English word memorization?

By the way, Word Power Made Easy by Norman Lewis was mentioned in that guy's post.

After reading such a number of reasonable, detailed and helpful answers, I ruminated and decided not to second (in fact, I did :D) any answer here to avoid leaving future confusion to visitors to this post. Every answer here is super delicious, and thus it's hard to judge a BEST one. And, I believe, everyone have his/her own ways of vocabularies acquisition so it depends. Am I right? o(^v^)o

At last, sincere thanks to everyone who generously answered this post and gave me their interesting perspectives. ;D