Intensive Reading: How to work with vocabulary?

[Ольга]

Today I have bought a CPE collection of practice tests.
I am interested how to work with the texts from the tests after finishing the tests. What do you do, when you see that you made a mistake? How do you work on your mistakes? How do you prefer to memorize collocations and colligations?
I think it should be some kind of intensive work, like, after finishing the tests, counting the mistakes, working on the weak points, translating the unknown vocabulary, learning by heart the unknown vocabulary, creating sentences with new collocations, colligations, and phrasal verbs, creating essays with these chunks, using them in your speech (creating videos, for instance).
But, maybe, there are some more creative ways, like creating mini-stories with the vocabulary, or... I don't know. Your variants?

[SophiaMerlin_II]

Like you said here, when I was learning Spanish, what helped me the most was to write all the vocabulary and grammar into a story.

I would list the vocabulary and grammar points, then write about them, and cross them off the list when I had used them, then asked my teacher for some corrections. It was the most fun way I have ever used because I really enjoy writing fiction (even if it is not very good).

If you decide to try that, feel free to PM it to me and I will look over it ^.^

[Dylan95]

I write a daily journal and usually try to include some of my weekly and all of my daily vocab into my journals even if that's awkward. Somewhat similar to what SophiaMerlin does I suppose.

It often times highlight words I had to look up or vocab words within the journal so that when I go back and read them, I can review the words easily.

Apart from that, I too what like to hear other methods! Getting to C1 is taking forever!

[Iversen]

As part of my intensive studies I normally copy text passages while asking myself what everything means and why it is written as it is, and I do this on folded A4 sheets where I leave a margin to the right to unknown words and - if there is space enough - also short idioms and other relevant details. For instance I went through one full printed page in Russian today, which in my handwritten version filled up 1½ page, and I have noted around 30 words and expressions down (including some I did know beforehand, but just wanted to reinforce). If I work from a bilingual version then I just use the translations given there, and if not or if they look suspicious I look the words up. And later I transfer the words into a wordlist. At that point I may check some words once more (or for the first time) to make sure I don't memorize flagrant errors.

As for the wordlists I have written a lot about them so I won't repeat it all here. You can read the whole caboodle in my Guide to learning languages.