The vocabulary that actually appears in the paper

Three doubts, all about words. They arrive separately and they have one answer between them: the list that works is the one you build yourself, out of things you have already met once.

The vocabulary being taught is harder than the vocabulary being tested

Exam vocab is usually basic, but the vocab teachers cover is tougher — which vocab actually helps?

Vocab ka exam-level basic hota hai lekin jo teacher padhate hain wo tough words hote hain — konsa vocab actually kaam aata hai?

This mismatch is real, and it is worth trusting your own instinct on. A lot of coaching vocabulary lists are built to look comprehensive on a PDF, not to match what the paper actually tests.

Banking exams mostly test moderately common words used in context — synonyms and antonyms embedded in a sentence, and phrasal verbs pulled from editorial-style writing. Not obscure, dictionary-only words.

The most reliable fix is boring and it works:

Go through four to five previous year papers — Prelims and Mains both, across SBI and IBPS — and note down every single word you did not already know that actually appeared in a real question.

That list will be shorter than any generic word bank, and far more repetitive across years. Which is exactly why it works better.

I need a list of idioms and phrasal verbs

Need a list of phrasal verbs/idioms relevant for banking exams.

Banking exam-relevant phrasal verbs/idioms ki list chahiye.

A downloaded two-hundred-item idioms list rarely helps in practice. Most of those entries are picked to look thorough rather than because they turn up in a real paper — and a list you did not build yourself is much easier to forget.

What works more reliably is picking phrasal verbs up directly from editorial reading. The Hindu, the Indian Express, any comparable op-ed source. That is the exact register banking exam passages are drawn from: same tone, same kind of vocabulary, same sentence complexity.

Keep a running list of only the phrasal verbs and idioms you personally encounter while reading. Even three or four a week is enough.

A list built that way — from words you have already seen in context once — sticks in memory far better than a longer one memorised cold. The reading is doing double duty anyway, since it is also what fixes comprehension speed.

I forget spellings and cannot pronounce some words

I forget spellings very quickly, and can’t pronounce certain words.

Spellings bahut jaldi bhool jaata/jaati hoon, aur kuch words pronounce karna nahi aata.

Worth saying plainly: spelling and pronunciation almost never appear as their own question type in IBPS or SBI exams. If this is eating a lot of daily worry, that worry is currently misallocated.

Where spelling does quietly matter is descriptive writing in Mains, where a wrongly spelled word can cost marks. So it is not irrelevant — just lower priority than Error Detection or vocabulary right now.

If it genuinely bothers you, the fix that beats re-reading is writing the word by hand three times while saying it out loud. That combination is what actually moves it into memory.

But the bigger unlock here is usually just permission to stop worrying about it, and to redirect that attention to grammar and vocabulary — which move the needle at every stage of the exam.

The pattern underneath all three

Every one of these answers points the same direction: away from lists handed to you, and towards a much shorter list assembled from real papers and real reading.

That is not a productivity trick. It is that a word you met in a sentence you were already reading has a context attached to it, and a word from row 147 of a PDF does not.