The Language: First things first.

                                                                     
 One of the most important things to a student in whatever scientific field is : Language! It's not a personal opinion but a fact so long ago was agreed upon that it needs no discussion! How do you think terminology as simple as "morphology" came to existence if the scholars at their time didn't study Latin?. That's because they understood the role of language ( Latin was for a long time the language of Science at the time in which scientific papers were published).
So, one might say that a student needs: to train himself to have a good memory (yes! there are ways!), to be patient, organized, etc. But, language will always be an indispensable pillar to success in studying.
When I was in my first year, luckily, I was aware of that. I knew it would be tiring to have to go to the dictionary every now & then. So, I came up with a little plan  to help me stay ahead of the language in the courses. In fact, thanks to this little plan, I never had to go to a dictionary while I'm studying something throughout the years. That's because I had already known the word or terminology. So, when the lecturer used a word for the first time, I readily understood it. So, what was this 'little plan'?
It's not like I can see the future or a magician of some sort! No. I simply learned new words every single day. Especially, in my first year. I used many sources. for example, There was this Physics book :
Contemporary Modern Physics ( I learned the word contemporary from there) plus other books. But that doesn't cover terminology. A colleague of mine I'd recently known at the time told me that she studied terminology before starting university for two months. But I needed something faster, something that is personalized & efficient. So, I finally found the answer. There is this article in Wikipedia :List of Greek & Latin roots  Which has another version :":List of prefixes, suffixes used in Medical terminology They're simply very long lists of almost every prefix, root, & suffix that comes from Latin to form a terminology. A few lectures in Biochemistry will show you that "Poly-" =Many. "Mono-"=one.etc.
Now imagine you know tons of those! as there are so many of them you'll encounter throughout the four years. Some of them will be repeated so often everyone will remember them. But some are tricky, most students will have hard time remembering or studying them. The list have hundreds like the examples I gave. You don't have to memorize them. Just study some every now & then & gradually you'll be able to easily 'predict' the meaning of a terminology you see for the first time. It's also necessary to have a vocabulary notebook for words with intersting meanings. instead of just writing the meaning on sheets (as most students did). This will show our brain that we actually care about these words than just look them up every time in the dictionary.
So,....many people will ask; How many words per day? or like another question: "how many hours should I study daily? I say that knowledge is like food! Have anyone said:" I'll eat this lunch in 15 minutes & when 15 minutes pass he stops eating even if he's still hungry? Knowledge is food to our brain! study until "he's" had enough! Developing this habit of putting time aside especially for the language every now & then, will definitely get you used to it & make studying many times easier. I'll sometimes post about how/what words, terminology will be needed in some courses.
Good luck!