How Many Suneung (SAT-Level) Vocabulary Words Should You Study Per Day? A 4-Week Plan
2026-07-25 · Vocab Learning
How many suneung (Korean CSAT) or SAT vocabulary words should you study per day? The honest answer is: probably fewer new words than you think, paired with steady review. 20–30 new words a day is a reasonable ceiling rather than a research finding — push past it without review and most of it fades within days.
The count is not the thing that matters
Too few and you never cover the exam's range. Too many and review backs up until the early words are gone before you return to them.
So the number to watch is not new words per day but the ratio of new to reviewed. A plan that adds 30 a day and reviews none is worse than one that adds 15 and comes back to them twice.
A repeatable four-week rhythm
| Week | New words | Review focus |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | ~20 a day | Same-day second pass over what you learned |
| Week 2 | 20–25 a day | The week 1 words you kept missing |
| Week 3 | 25–30 a day | Weeks 1–2 mixed and shuffled |
| Week 4 | Cut to 15–20 | Everything from the full cycle |
Then pick a fresh batch and run it again. The exact counts are less important than the direction: review takes a larger share as the weeks go on.
Week 4 deliberately drops the new-word count. Cutting intake to finish consolidating is the step most plans skip, and it is why the third week of a four-week plan is usually where things fall apart.
Why games beat a static list here
Reading a list is passive recognition. A game forces active recall every round, which is the kind of memory that survives exam pressure — you have produced the word from nothing before, so you can do it again.
It also solves the review bookkeeping. You do not have to track which words to revisit; the ones you missed are the ones that collect. More on the mechanism in the suneung vocab game guide.
Running this plan on WordMaster
Meet new words in High School mode, whose pool is the 103 words that recur in 수능 and SAT passages. Anything you miss lands in My Words automatically, so the review column of the table above fills itself.
Anchor the whole thing with one Daily Challenge at the same time each morning, and the four-week rhythm runs without your having to think about it. For using the other formats, see the word game guide.
Start with 20 in High School mode today. The plan takes care of the rest.