A student preparing for an English exam memorized the words conserve, conservation, and conservative as one family. During reading, however, he often chose the familiar-looking form without checking what the sentence required. In a passage about water, the blank followed an article and an adjective, so it needed a noun naming a practice. In another sentence, the blank followed a modal verb and needed a base-form verb. His teacher asked him to mark the slot before recalling a Korean meaning: determiner plus adjective plus noun, modal plus verb, or linking verb plus adjective. The student then used meaning to choose among forms that fit the grammatical slot. This order did not make vocabulary knowledge less important. It prevented a vague memory of meaning from overriding the sentence structure. After several days, he could explain not only which form was correct but also why the other members of the same family could not occupy that position.