What you're looking at is called "passive voice". Basically, the subject of the sentence receives the action instead of doing it.
So in your example, the subject of the sentence is "the words". However, they don't do anything - someone will learn them, and maybe it's you (or me!). So, "be learned" is how you tell us what happens to those words.
If you mean the whole "the words to be learned" part, then you understand it as "the words which are to be learned". We use the "to be (verb)" pattern to mean an action which is expected.
There are the words which are to be learned.
You are to learn these words.