Quote Originally Posted by Sollos
Finally, how should I prepare for a vocabulary intensive semester? I started out this year by putting the words we learned into a Spaced-Repetition Memory software, but this quickly became unwieldy. Perhaps I should do handwritten notecards?
The only way to enhance your vocabulary intensively is reading, reading and reading, maybe even reading all the day long. This is the most time consuming task. So, find books which you would like to read in English and read it in Russian. There are a lot of books of classic (non Russian) authors which were translated to Russian. For the beginner the non genuine Russian books (books which were originally written in non Russian language, English for an example) would be the best. These books mainly have no weird Russian grammar but have really big vocabulary. You can take books which you've liked to read in English (sci-fi, detectives, horrors or whatever you like) and find a Russian translation.