Hi. I’m new to the forum. I started learning the african countries and its capitals, and I started wondering if there exists a good way to memorize all the coutry bordes to the point of being able to just draw the map of the continent. Does anyone have experience with memorizing this kind of stuff? Is there a certain technique for that?
Thanks.
I have a whole story that I’ve made up for memorising Africa. I start with a character called CHAD, whose head is the shape of Chad. He loves CARs and has some decorating his collar, which reminds me of Central African Republic. He has a huge quiff which he’s coated LIBERALLY with grease, which gives me LIBYA, but he’s carelessly rubbed some TUNA MAYONNAISE into the tip, which gives me TUNISIA.
And so on… There’s lots of other weird, sexy, funny, disastrous or gross things going on at house party that is happening around him. Because I’ve made each thing relate to the shape as well as the name of each country, and because they interact with the things around them, it’s really quite effective for remembering the rough shape and size of each country, and how they all connect.
For example, not long after I created the story, my brother challenged me to name all the African countries that touch the Equator. I was able to do this mentally without too much effort.
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Thanks. Great tip!
@CakeForBreakfast Really great description provided. Thanks for sharing that!
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Also I’ve tried to make pictures out of the shape of the countries into something to help me remember it. For example for Peru i picture a man climbing with pears falling out of his backpack, “pear-u”.
So I’m experimenting right with imposing shape to learn 2d drawing. The idea is like the story to try to extract a smaller set of info from the country shape to memorize it. Not usefull if you need the details.
Also I remember reading in this forum that our mind love contrast so maybe you can try to learn only the angle change and not the line and make up a story or even transform the shape into a memory palace where you store info about the country. Depend how deep you want to go 
Much more commitment than the strategy above, but possibly more extensible and valuable as well, is reading up history or stories that tie several countries together.
For example, reading any pre-Suez canal account of sailing around Africa (e.g. Cook expedition) will give you a visceral understanding of just about every important port city of the continent.
For more modern contestants, try The Road Chose Me or the four Top Gear specials set in Africa.
If you’re interested in history, larger wars are potent sources; you will get a solid understanding of which countries are close to which, share climate, compete for resources, drink from the same river etc.
If you afterwards try to memorize granular and exact border shapes, you will have intuitive insights like “ah, of course, that border is simply this river” or “this is a straight line because it was drawn by colonizer X who was everywhere in these parts”.
Of course, this approach is only worth it if you have any love for such sources, otherwise you just 20x the work load.
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