Memorising the Countries and Capitals of the World

To memorise the countries of the world and their capitals, give each country a fixed picture, turn its capital into a sound-alike keyword picture, make the two act on each other, and set the pairs along a route through a place you know: one room, or one palace, per region. Australia is a kangaroo and Canberra is a can of berries, so the kangaroo eats berries from a can it keeps in its pouch. Asked for the capital of Australia, you see the kangaroo, the can comes with it, and the can says Canberra, not Sydney.

The route is what makes two hundred pairs checkable. Walk a region's room and you meet every country in it, in the same order, every time, so a missing country shows up as an empty stop; a pile of flashcards never tells you what is missing. The worked room below puts the twelve capitals of South America in order, to walk forwards and backwards.

First, decide which countries

"How many countries are there?" has more than one honest answer, and your list sets how many stops you need. The United Nations has 193 member states, a figure unchanged since South Sudan was admitted in

2011. Two more, the Holy See and the State of Palestine, are

non-member observer states, which makes 195. Wikipedia's list of sovereign states counts 205: the 193 members, the two observers, and ten others that are neither, Taiwan and Kosovo among them.

Use whichever list your quiz or exam uses, and decide now about territories such as French Guiana, which is part of France. A forum member who put 196 capitals into ten palaces left them out ("And no territories included here"); they can have a room of their own later.

The method in two links

One Art of Memory poster, asking whether it worked like learning vocabulary, guessed the method in a sentence: "Create one picture for a country, another one for the country's capital and then link them together." Those are the two links the keyword method uses for a foreign word.

A fixed picture for the country. Choose something you can see at once and use it every time: a kangaroo for Australia, a maple leaf for Canada. Where nothing comes to mind, go by sound: Hungary is a hungry man, Iceland an ice cube, Uganda a gander. This picture is the country's peg, in the sense of the peg system: the fixed hook the capital hangs from, and later the flag, if you want flags.

A keyword for the capital, and an interaction. Turn the capital into a concrete thing it sounds like, then make the country picture do something to it. The hungry man eats a cake shaped like a Buddha and swats a pest off it: Buda, pest. The ice cube has a Viking frozen inside, still holding a rake: Reykjavík. The gander has pitched a camp, which is how one poster gets there: "Or camp to think of Kampala." The keyword guide's own example, Maryland as marry and Annapolis as apple, goes back to the classroom studies at the end of this guide.

Three rules keep the keywords working.

Concrete beats clever. A forum member who learned 196 capitals found that "using people or concrete objects works so much better than trying to use an abstract phrase or idea." Borrowed keywords would not stick for her; the lab evidence in the keyword guide gives self-made ones no general advantage, so take whichever arrives first and replace any that fail a test.

A keyword covers a sound, not a spelling. "You don´t need every letter or the exact order," another poster writes, getting Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, from "ant, (b)anana, riv(er)". Spelling, if your test marks it, is a separate job.

The keyword has to lead back to the name. Children in the studies below sometimes recalled a capital's keyword but not the capital itself. Say each capital aloud a few times before you build its picture, and again over the picture.

Free ones first

More than a dozen capitals are the country's own name, or close to it, among them Mexico City, Guatemala City, Panama City, Kuwait City, Singapore, Luxembourg, Djibouti, Vatican City, the City of San Marino, Andorra la Vella, Tunis, Algiers and Bissau for Guinea-Bissau. (Monaco's constitution names no capital at all.) These need no keyword, only a sign in the country picture with its own name on it. Brasília looks free too and is a trap; it comes up below.

One room: South America in twelve stops

South America has twelve sovereign states (French Guiana is part of France, and the Falkland Islands are a dependent territory), and the Tuscan Villa, one of the six stock palaces on this site, has twelve loci in a fixed walk. The fit is luck; the method is not.

The order comes from the map. One practitioner places countries "in order of how i would walk through that region if the map was on the floor". This walk goes north up the west coast, east along the top, down the east side, across the south, back up the west coast and into the middle, and every step crosses a border.

Read each scene slowly enough to see it.

1, the front gate. A white line is painted across the gate: the equator. A mosquito the size of a cat walks it like a tightrope. Ecuador, Quito.

2, the gravel courtyard. Beside the well, a stone column is sinking into a bog. Colombia, Bogotá.

3, the front door. The Venus de Milo stands in the doorway. A car pulls up and the driver shakes maracas at her; she has no arms to shake them back. Venezuela, Caracas.

4, the entry hall. The marble bust is of an ordinary guy, with GEORGE chalked across his forehead and a little town drawn round his collar. Guyana, Georgetown.

5, the kitchen. A surgeon is operating on the long table, and the patient is a parrot dressed for its wedding, a white bow round its neck. Suriname, Paramaribo: parrot, marry, bow.

6, the dining room. A Brazil nut with wings taxis down the white linen, because Brasília was laid out in the shape of an aeroplane. The trap, Rio de Janeiro, is a beach towel left on the table: Brasília was founded on 21 April 1960 to replace Rio as the capital.

7, the library. On the reading table an urn plays a video of a mountain. Uruguay, Montevideo. The urn keeps Uruguay apart from Paraguay, which shares its ending: Uru is an urn, Para a parachute.

8, the salon. Messi is at the piano with an oxygen tank strapped to his back, borrowed from a forum post: "For Argentina, I pictured Messi and for its capital of Buenos Aires an oxygen tank", since, the poster explains, the name means good air.

9, the terrace. Santa sits on the stone bench eating a chilli pepper, turns scarlet and shouts "Go!" at his reindeer. Chile, Santiago.

10, the olive grove. A pear hangs among the olives, and someone is squeezing a lime over it. Peru, Lima.

11, the vegetable garden. A bowling ball rolls through the tomato vines towards the black cat asleep there, which holds a sugar cube in its paws. Bolivia has two capitals: Sucre, the sugar, is the capital in the constitution, and La Paz, the paws that do the work, is the seat of government.

12, the stone shed. A parachute has come down through the roof, and the sun blazes through the hole it tore. Paraguay, Asunción.

Now walk it, then back from the shed to the gate, then out of order: the fifth, the ninth, the second. If a scene does not come back, the two pictures were only near each other; make one do something to the other.

The capitals everyone gets wrong

Each of these countries has a bigger or more famous city that is not the capital. Put the wrong city into the scene and have the country turn its back on it, so the trap becomes part of the memory instead of a rival.

Australia: Canberra, not Sydney. Canberra's site was chosen in 1908 as a compromise between Sydney and Melbourne, Australia's two largest cities. The kangaroo stands between them, its back to both, eating berries from its can.

Canada: Ottawa, not Toronto. Toronto is Canada's most populous city, but Queen Victoria chose Ottawa as the capital, effective 31 December 1857. An otter floats on its back on a giant maple leaf, wearing her crown.

Türkiye: Ankara, not Istanbul. Ankara became the capital when the Republic was founded on 29 October 1923, succeeding Istanbul, still the larger city. The country's UN name has been Türkiye since 2022, and Türkiye sounds like tour key: a tour guide's giant key is chained to a ship's anchor, Ankara, which holds it fast.

Brazil: Brasília, not Rio de Janeiro. Its scene is stop 6 above.

New Zealand: Wellington, not Auckland. Auckland, the most populous city, was made the capital in 1841; Wellington replaced it in 1865. Its gales earned it the nickname "Windy Wellington", so the kiwi wears Wellington boots and leans into the wind.

The same move covers capitals that were moved on purpose: Nigeria's Abuja replaced Lagos, its most populous city, on 12 December 1991, and Myanmar's Naypyidaw took over from Yangon.

Countries that look alike

When two names are close, make their pictures different on purpose and learn the pair in one sitting, with the difference spelled out.

Niger and Nigeria. Niger's picture is the Niger River, and its capital, Niamey, lies on that river: a knee sticks up out of the water. Nigeria, the longer name, is a knight in full gear (Ni-geria), holding a jar from which a ghost says "boo": Abuja.

Slovakia and Slovenia. Bratislava ends in nearly the sound Slovakia starts with: Brati-slava, Slova-kia. It is also the only national capital with land borders with two other sovereign states, Austria and Hungary, so stand a brat on the border with a foot in each. Slovenia gets the dragon that is Ljubljana's symbol, on its coat of arms and its Dragon Bridge; for the sound, the dragon eats a blue banana, lju-blja-na.

Austria and Australia. Austria is an ostrich gulping a string of Vienna sausages; Australia is the kangaroo with its can, and the two animals never meet.

Split capitals, and capitals on the move

Some countries split the job between cities, and a few capitals are changing. This is the position as of October 2026; check your answer key, because some accept only one city.

• Bolivia. Sucre is the constitutional capital; La Paz is the seat of government.
• South Africa. Pretoria is the administrative and executive capital, Cape Town the legislative and Bloemfontein the judicial.
• The Netherlands. Amsterdam is the capital under the constitution; The Hague is the seat of government.
• Côte d'Ivoire. Yamoussoukro is the official capital; Abidjan, the largest city, is the economic capital and still hosts some government offices.
• Sri Lanka. Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte is the legislative capital; Colombo is the executive, judicial and commercial one.
• Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur is the constitutional and legislative capital and the royal seat; Putrajaya is the administrative and judicial capital in practice.
• Benin. Porto-Novo is the official capital; Cotonou is the seat of government.
• Kazakhstan. Astana replaced Almaty as the capital in December 1997, was renamed Nur-Sultan in March 2019, and took back the name Astana in September 2022, so a list printed in between says Nur-Sultan.
• Indonesia. Jakarta is still the capital in practice. Nusantara, on Borneo, is a city under construction planned to replace it; its inauguration as the capital was scheduled for 17 August 2024 and did not take place.
• Equatorial Guinea. A presidential decree in January 2026 named Ciudad de la Paz, a city still being built, as the capital in place of Malabo, and gave government agencies a year to move there.

For a split capital, put every city in one scene, each a prop with its role built in, like Bolivia's sugar in the paws. For a capital in flux, learn the one your list uses and add the other when it settles.

Building the palace: a room per region

The keyword guide argues that a vocabulary list usually needs no palace, and for words it is right. A country list is different: you are asked for all of it, and the route is what tells you that you have all of it.

Chunk by region. One poster "divided the world in 8 parts"; another "broke the countries down by their United Nations Region". The UN's grouping, its M49 standard, is ready-made: Africa splits into Northern Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa into Eastern, Middle, Southern and Western Africa; the Americas into Northern America and Latin America and the Caribbean, which divides into the Caribbean, Central America and South America. A sub-region is an evening's work and one room.

Stops in map order. The stock palaces here have 12 to 16 loci each, enough for most sub-regions. Order the stops by the map rather than the alphabet: you get rough locations free, and neighbours sit side by side where you can tell them apart. When a region overflows, put two pairs on a locus, as the poster with ten palaces did ("Each palace has 10 locations, each location as two countries/capitals"), or split the space: "Don't get tied into thinking a whole room needs to be a whole region."

Mark every tenth stop. One practitioner numbered a route through the world's countries "with a number image for every tenth country". Use the site's Major System pegs for it: toes at the tenth stop, a nose at the twentieth, a mouse at the thirtieth, a rose at the fortieth, lace at the fiftieth. A region of twenty-three countries then ends three stops past the nose; if it ends anywhere else, you have dropped one.

How fast to go

The reports are anecdotes, and they vary. The poster who divided the world in eight parts, working through the 193 UN members, wrote: "I memorized 5 countries every day", and "It took a while to memorize all of them; more than one month." The poster with ten palaces first wrote a mnemonic against each country on an alphabetical list, found she "couldn't recall all the countries", moved them into the palaces, and then "worked on it here and there over 7 days". A pace between them:

Day one. The free capitals and the South America room. Test the room forwards, backwards and out of order before you stop.

Day two onwards. One sub-region a day, ten to fifteen new pairs, each session opening with a cold walk of every room built so far. Learn a look-alike pair side by side, on the day you meet its second member. At that rate the 193 UN members take two to three weeks.

Reviews. Recall every new pair once within the hour, as part of building it; the first spaced review is the next day. For a quiz a month away, review the next day, at about day 7 and about day 20, and in a last pass two days before; to keep the set for good, use gaps of about 1, 6 and 16 days, then monthly. The spaced repetition guide explains why the gaps grow.

Test three ways, because they fail separately: country to capital, capital to country, and a walk naming every country in each room. The walk catches the country you forgot existed.

Flags and maps, if you want them

A palace teaches pairs, not geography. Stops in map order give a rough sense of what lies next to what, but they will not let you put Chad on a blank map. The poster with ten palaces had "already learned the locations of most of the countries of the world" before she started on capitals; a recent reply treats the map as the route ("The map itself is already a memory palace"), and another turns outlines into pictures: "China was a giant chicken with two island legs (Taiwan and Hainan)". If location matters to you, drill a blank map as its own task.

Flags are the most optional layer. Add one only when the capital comes back without effort, as the flag's one distinctive feature worn by the country picture you already have. One poster "just learned the flags through Sporcle and repetition"; another found that flags learned with a quiz app faded "if I don't keep up with it", while what they kept "with a memory palace" needed a refresh only "once every couple of months". That is one person's experience, not a measurement.

Doing it on this site

In My Dict, start a deck for each region and add each country as the word, with its capital and your picture as the note: "Bolivia", and "Sucre (constitution), La Paz (government): bowling ball, sugar in a cat's paws". Or save the list as a .csv file with a header row of front,back and upload it at the import page (it also takes .tsv, Anki's .txt export and .apkg), which names the new deck after the file. Then adopt a palace from the palace library, or create one from a building you know, and pin each card to its stop in walking order; a stop can hold more than one card.

Palace practice shows the palace, the room and its place in the walk; you say what is pinned there, reveal the card's word and note, and grade yourself miss, hard or easy. It needs at least three pinned cards and takes the ones that are due, most overdue first, never-reviewed cards counting as due now, up to twenty a session. It does not remind you, so the review days are yours to keep. The "any deck" drill on the practice page runs the same cards without the palace: five, ten or twenty cards and a memorise window of fifteen seconds to three minutes, then each country alone while you recall its capital. Due cards come first, most overdue first; then undrilled ones and the rest, in deck order. It never shuffles, so for a random-order test, have someone read country names to you.

What the research shows, and what it does not

The best evidence for capitals in particular is a pair of small classroom studies on the US states from Joel Levin's group at the University of Wisconsin.

In the first, published in 1980 with twenty-two children in a combined fourth- and fifth-grade class, pupils learned a keyword for each state (Maryland, marry), then one for each capital (Annapolis, apple), and only then saw a picture joining the two: two apples getting married. Compared with children given the same time to study however they liked, they "remembered substantially more", and the gap was largest on the delayed test.

The follow-up, written up in 1981 and published in 1982, pitted those plain pictures against the busier ones in a 1978 book by Jerry Lucas, co-author of The Memory Book, which turned every syllable into a word: Mary rows to land and finds a man taking a nap on a pole, no less. With 88 fourth and fifth graders, then 59 fourth graders, each learning fourteen capitals, the plain pictures came out ahead and the Lucas materials did no better than the children's own methods. Shown all at once on a single page, as Lucas presented his, even the plain pictures lost their measurable advantage.

The authors were candid that their own lead had shrunk and was not reliable on every test, and their diagnosis is the most useful sentence in this research: "a student might well remember the picture of two apples getting married, but getting from apple to Annapolis is quite a different matter." When answers such as "apple" were counted, the scores of the children taught the plain pictures in three stages rose by 7 to 12 percentage points: the children had kept the picture and lost the name. The 1980 pupils had met the capital names in class beforehand and had more keyword practice. Hence the rule above: make the names familiar first.

What these studies do not show is just as plain: they are small studies of children learning US state capitals, and none covers two hundred countries, adults or a route. For the palace side, see the method of loci guide; for the wider keyword evidence, including its faster forgetting without review, the keyword method guide. The route, the pace and the reviews here rest on practitioners' experience and the general case for testing and spacing, not on a capitals trial.

Tonight

Build the South America room and walk it twice, forwards and then from the shed back to the gate. Tomorrow morning, before you look at anything, write the twelve capitals in order. If ten or more come back, the method has taken: start a sub-region a day.