Whats the fastest way to memorize answers to a quiz?

Hello its me: Whats the fastest way to memorize answers to a quiz?
hi i have a quiz of africa soon. Its difficult because i have to memorize the capitals of all the countries. I really need help because most of the capitals are outrageous words like Ouagiouge! how am i supossed to remember that? Please help me!

Answers and Views:

Answer by yellowstar
i do silly things like acronyms
i am currently taking anatomy and inorder to memorize all the bones i make stupid acronyms
making up a little story helps
my eight grade teacher said this about iran and iraq
“if I RAN through IRAN i would be really tired”
meaning iran is the larger one of the two and when you are given a map you know that iran is the larger one on the right and iraq is the smaller one

make up stupid things acronyms or stories.. it really helps

Answer by someone else
Coming up with memory tricks (“mnemonics”) as previously mentioned is a good idea. Make them as silly as you like, and if you can, make them rhyme to help them stick in your mind. With some of the more outrageous words, don’t focus on pronouncing them correctly, in fact you should intentionally mispronounce them to emphasize their spelling (Ouagiouge= Oh, You a G, I owe you Gee” as in what do you tell a gangster if you suddenly realize you owe him $ 1000. Stupid, but it can work)

Generally, information can be learned in 3 basic ways. You can see it, you can hear it, you can do it. I used to memorize vocabulary doing all three ways. I’d read the words out loud (thus seeing it and hearing it), perhaps even writing it out (doing it). With the capitals, I’d put your finger on the map when doing this. You could even divide up the map into fifths and use a different finger for each fifth. Keep saying and pointing to the capitals in some area until you think you have it down. Then quiz yourself, doing them in random order. If you make a mistake, you have to write the answer down 5 times and quiz yourself again until you get every answer right in that area. Then, move on to another. Quiz yourself on that new area once you’ve mastered it, but also include some questions from the first region. If you make any mistakes, you have to start over and write the right answer 5 times while saying it out loud. That part is key. I hated doing that, so by forcing myself to write things a bunch of times whenever I screwed up, it trained my brain to not screw up (kind of like squirting a cat every time it claws the furniture teaches it not to claw the furniture). Even if you don’t learn not to screw up, you’re at least repeating the info to help learn it.

If you don’t have to do this on a map, that makes it even easier. After you spend some time staring at the list, reading each country and capital out loud trying to memorize it, cover up the capitals so all you see are the countries, then in random order, do the capitals. If you screw up any of them, you have to do the 5x writing. When you can do that perfectly, cover the countries and do those when looking at the capitals’ names. If you screw up, write it 5x AND then retest yourself on the first (countries= capitals).