Originally Posted by Thomas Percy
I am not a native speaker of English. ... But I prepared GRE by memorizing a book of words. I got 96% in the verbal section....

I'm a native speaker. I read a lot and have a large vocabulary as a result. On my first GRE practice run, I got a verbal score at the 97th or 98th percentile. Then I, too, learned a lot of words (wonder if we used the same book?) and my score went up to past the 99th. Honestly, I enjoyed doing that, and I've incorporated a lot of those words into my standard vocabulary (it helps that I have a friend who's a voracious reader and a daughter who wants to get to the national level of the spelling bee).