The hassle of learning new words...

At the moment (just like all my fellow students) I am having a hard time sitting down and memorizing the JWI glossary.
My main problem when it comes to new words is my weaker self, this mean inner voice that keeps asking me: Will you ever hear these words again? Will you ever use them?
And the answer simply is yes. Whenever I read Under the Tuscan Sun (which I'll soon be finished with), I come across a word from the glossary. This really helps me memorizing them, the more sentences with the word I read, the easier I make the word mine. The thing is: I have to see the word in context, and I have to hear it. Finding sentences is as easy as pie thanks to the many monolingual dictionaries that offer an explanation plus a sentence in which it is used.
But hearing it... My way of learning new words is repeating the explanation and the sample sentence again and again. This has the effect that my flatmates are sometimes very concerned about my mental health when I'm alone in my room, repeating the same thing again and again. But it works, and they think I'm crazy anyway, so there's really nothing to lose for me....