Hey there Linnea here! I'm one of the GMAT experts at Magoosh and today I want to talk to you about
how can non-native students master GMAT verbal. Alright we're going to kick things off by talking
about sentence corrections because many of our non-native students tell us that diving into the
world of GMAT sentence corrections can feel a bit intimidating and our response to those students
is understandably so. The GMAT presents you with complex wordy sentences and they're often written
about incredibly obscure topics ultimately the way they're designed is to make students feel
nervous it's to make students sweat but we always remind our students that anything new
or unfamiliar is often going to feel unsettling and with a little direction and a lot of practice,
a whole lot of practice, you're going to start to feel more confident and you will see a significant
improvement in this question type. So the approaches we're going to talk about are going to
help build familiarity, guide your study approach, and ultimately boost your confidence. Okie-dokie
the first approach we're going to talk about is to focus on the rules that the GMAT actually tests.
The GMAT tests a specific set of grammar rules and they tend to avoid those incredibly
rare constructions that only the most devoted grammarians would be familiar with and that
means you want to make sure that you devote your time and energy to the rules that occur frequently
on the test. For example you want to make sure that you're familiar with agreement you want to be very
familiar with parallel constructions. Be familiar with verb tenses, understand how modifiers affect
the structure of a sentence, and that's just to name a few of them. But those are the ones that are
going to be tested more heavily. A lot of students ask us about idioms and I want to stress that
idioms have been greatly reduced over the years in sentence corrections which means that you probably
don't want to prioritize memorizing all the idioms that ever were known to man. Idioms certainly can
help you navigate some questions but they don't occur frequently enough that memorizing huge lists
of idioms will be a huge help to you come test day. So you really want to make sure that you become
more familiar and spend more of your time building familiarity with the more commonly tested rules. So
you might be wondering where you could find a list of rules that are commonly tested
and we've got you so for a list of grammar rules that you need to know for GMAT check out the link
to our blog post that covers GMAT grammar basics. The second approach we're going to talk about is
to focus on meaning rather than getting caught up in all the details. So on your initial read
of a sentence correction take a moment to try to process what it's attempting to communicate versus
what it's actually communicating. So if you take a second to capture the sentence's intended meaning
you will have an easier time recognizing constructions that confuse that meaning. This is
especially the case when you have a question that is testing something like a dangling or misplaced
modifier. So for example if I were to write "While running down the street my cell phone fell."
The intended meaning is that I a human actor was running down the street and my cell phone
fell out of my hand or my pocket or it fell out of my bag, but I didn't include a human
actor within the sentence and that is inaccurate. So the literal meaning of the original sentence
"While running down the street my cell phone fell." is that my cell phone
sprouted legs took off running, probably for its freedom because it's overworked,
and then tripped over something the curb or a small dog regardless it's a nonsense sentence.
That sentence has to have a human actor so it's one of those things you want to pay attention
to when you do that initial read. Does it make sense in the way that it's being communicated?
If you recognize that it doesn't make sense then you can quickly eliminate answer choices
that confuse that intended meaning or make that intended meaning seem nonsensical and speaking
about answer choices it's going to bring us to our third approach which is to focus on splits.
You don't want to read the prompt and then read each and every answer choice because you simply
do not have enough time to do so you will run out of time in the verbal section if you attempt
to do that. So rather than focus on each and every word presented to you in these questions
immediately go to the answer choices after you've done your initial read of the sentence go to the
answer choices and look for what's changing. The differences in the answer choices are a huge hint
as to the rule that GMAT's testing so let's say that answer choices a b and c have an -ing verb
construction and answer choices d and e have an -ed verb construction. So if that's the case
we have a 3-2 split the first three have an -ing construction the last two have an -ed construction.
Now we can tell that obviously they're testing some kind of verbal here and if we can determine
that we need the -ed verb construction then we can immediately eliminate a b and c and that's
awesome we're already down to two answer choices and we can compare those two answer choices to
see which one is the least flawed because remember you're not always looking for the perfect or ideal
way to communicate a sentence when you're encountering the GMAT answer choices. You're
looking for the best of what GMAT's giving you so one of those two remaining answer choices will be
less flawed and that will be considered the best and that's the answer choice that you should pick.
All right let's talk about reading. Reading to be fair reading comprehension skills do apply
to the entire verbal section and to some extent GMAT reading really does require the ability to
read quickly and accurately. The slower and less accurately you read the less time you have to work
all of those questions and all of those answer choices. So complicating the situation of course
is the level of vocabulary and sentence complexity that the GMAT throws at you.
Unfortunately there is no magic bullet or fast fix for gaps in reading comprehension.
Improving in reading takes a serious amount of time a ton of practice, a ton of practice,
and a significant amount of patience you want to be kind to yourself through this process
but of course we have advice on how and what to invest your time in. In terms of time reading
should be a huge part of your study if you're a non-native english speaker we recommend that you
spend at least an hour reading each day and that's on top of your GMAT prep that you're already doing
and you want to make sure you read materials that are written at the same complexity level as the
GMAT. Which brings us to our first approach to help you with reading we're going to talk about
what to read to prepare for the GMAT. so the passages on the GMAT fall into four categories you
have physical science passages, you have biological science passages, social science passages, and of
course you have business passages. So in practice you should read articles from each and every
one of those passage types for science-based passages. Scientific American is a great resource
for social science passages. The New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly
are tried and true resources that we've suggested to our students for many many years
and finally for business topics you can check out the Financial Times or The Economist
or you can navigate to the business section of something like Bloomberg News or BBC News.
Now if you simply don't find that you have as much time to read as I'm suggesting uh and that's
because well life is really busy it's crazy busy with work or school or family responsibilities and
that is completely understandable but you should still try to find a way to expose yourself to as
much english as possible. That can be done through English language shows and podcasts
The Daily from The New York times is an excellent podcast to begin with or How I Built This from NPR
and once you start with some of those podcasts hopefully you find some of your own favorites
and those end up being not only enjoyable but a great way to help bolster some of the English
skills that you'll need for the test. And that brings us to our second reading approach which is
use a reading driven method to build your own personal vocabulary list. Ultimately the GMAT is
testing your reasoning skills not your vocabulary skills, obviously if you have a larger vocabulary
it's going to make navigating the text easier but the more important thing is that you develop your
ability to focus on how words are used in context and your ability to use the surrounding words to
help you guess at the meaning of a word that you don't know and that means and you may have already
seen this coming. Your supplemental reading that you're doing just to build your overall comfort
level with GMAT reading that is the best resource for you to find new vocabulary words to use.
Reading to help build your vocabulary whenever you come across a word you don't know in your practice
imagine that there is a blank and then use the surrounding context clues to help you make a guess
at what word might fill in that blank. After you're done reading the passage go to a dictionary and
compare the dictionary meaning to the meaning that you made a guess at if those meanings are aligned.
That's awesome if they aren't that's where you have to dig back into the details look at those
surrounding context clues again to see what you might have missed and the words that you really
struggled with you can put those into your own personal word list that you're working on just to
help with personal development for the GMAT. So if you are using this reading driven method to build
your own vocabulary list that's great don't worry about trying to do an internet search to find
a great big long list of words that might appear on the GMAT because "might appear" on the GMAT isn't
all that helpful when it comes to what you're going to actually see on the GMAT for test day
and just working on building skills and vocabulary that help with improving your general reading
comprehension that is going to be so much more beneficial for you. Now the final thing we're going
to talk about approach number three is to remember that the big picture trumps the details so
a number of questions on the GMAT are focused on the big picture so therefore your comprehension
of the overall message is essential. How this translates to practice is to not let yourself
get caught up or frozen when you don't understand a word or even an entire sentence within the text
of a passage. When all said and done you might not have a question on that detail which means bullet
dodged or you can think about it as something you have to return to to spend a little bit more
time on. All of that will play into your pacing goals for the section to develop your skills in
focusing on the big picture you really want to practice skimming and summarizing so that means
that you should pay particular attention to the first and last sentences of each paragraph and
make note of any transition words that signal a turn or contrast within the paragraph itself.
Ultimately you want to work towards being able to succinctly articulate the general message of each
and every chunk of text a great way to practice this is to ask someone ideally someone who is
working for the GMAT but anyone who's willing to help you works as well and that's to ask them to
become your reading partner so each of you will read a passage you'll write down the main idea
of the entire passage and you'll also write down the main idea and the purpose of each
paragraph. Then you compare notes so if you've written similar ideas regarding the main idea
and the purpose of each paragraph that is awesome you're aligned you can continue to discuss what it
was that led you to those conclusions and if what you've written is not at all similar that is also
going to indicate you should dig back into the details of the passage together to see what either
of you might have missed. So you're helping each other make these connections and create greater
familiarity. All right y'all that about sums up the more high level and a few detailed approaches
to GMAT for non-native speakers. If you would like more help with the verbal section or if
you'd like help with the quantitative section the integrated reasoning section or even the essay
be sure to check out our other videos or check out specific lessons or upcoming
cohorts available through magoosh.com. If you feel this video has helped you let us know by
liking and be sure to subscribe for more videos from either me or the other GMAT experts here at
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the content that you would like to see thank you for watching and we'll see you next time.