How to Learn All 78 Tarot Cards (Without Cramming)

The usual approach to learning tarot is to buy a deck, open the book, and read all seventy-eight entries over a weekend.

It does not work, and the reason is not that you are bad at it. Seventy-eight card meanings read in isolation with nothing to attach them to is close to the worst possible way to get information into a head. By Wednesday you will have four cards and a vague sense that Swords are the bad ones.

Here is what actually works, in the order it works in.

Step one: learn the structure, not the cards

This is the step people skip and it is the one that makes everything after it cheaper.

Seventy-eight cards is not seventy-eight things. It is:

22 Major Arcana, which are archetypes and are genuinely individual.
40 numbered minors, which are ten numbers crossed with four suits.
16 court cards, which are four ranks crossed with the same four suits.

Learn ten numbers and four elements and you can construct any of the forty numbered cards without having read its page. Five is loss, Cups is feeling, so Five of Cups is grief. You did not memorise that; you worked it out.

That single move takes the memorisation problem from seventy-eight down to about thirty-eight, and thirty-eight is a manageable number.

What the numbers mean covers the ten stages properly, and the anatomy of a deck covers the whole structure in one lesson.

Step two: spaced repetition for the recall

Once you know the structure you still need the cards in your head fast enough to read a spread without stopping. That is a recall problem, and recall problems have a known solution.

Spaced repetition means being shown a thing just before you would have forgotten it. Get a card right and the gap before you see it again gets longer: one day, three days, a week, a month. Get it wrong and it comes back almost immediately.

The effect is that your revision time goes to the cards you do not know, instead of being spread evenly over cards you already do. That is the whole trick, and it is why the same twenty minutes gets you much further than reading.

The study drill here does this and is free with no signup to try. It introduces five new cards a day, so meeting the whole deck takes about a fortnight and getting them onto long gaps takes a few months of short daily sessions.

One thing it deliberately never asks: what a card means in a situation. There is no single correct reading of The Tower in a given position, and a drill that marked one answer right would be teaching you something false. It tests recall only: which card this is, which keywords belong to it, which element it carries.

Step three: one card a day, in real context

Drilling gets you names and keywords. It does not get you reading.

The thing that turns recall into fluency is meeting cards attached to your actual life. Draw one card in the morning, read it briefly, write one line about what you think it is pointing at. In the evening write one line about how the day actually went.

The gap between those two lines is where the learning happens. After ninety days you will have met most of the deck in context, and a card you have sat with once beats a card you have read about five times.

The daily card is one card for everybody, drawn from the date. The daily draw is your own. Either works; the writing is the part that matters.

What to do with a cheat sheet

Keep one beside you and plan to stop using it.

Keywords are scaffolding. They get you reading on day one and they will hold you back by month three, because a keyword list cannot tell you which part of a card matters in the position it landed in. Ours is free and not behind an email, which is unusual in this corner of the internet and should not be.

Use it to stop looking things up mid-reading. Then put it down.

What not to do

Do not read all 78 pages in order. You will remember the first six and The Tower.

Do not start with reversals. Learn seventy-eight upright meanings before you take on a hundred and fifty-six. You can turn reversals off entirely in your account settings here, and plenty of experienced readers never use them.

Do not skip the minors. They are the larger and quieter part of the deck and most of the useful reading you will ever do happens in them. Beginners avoid them because there are so many and they look repetitive next to Death. That is backwards.

Do not buy a second deck yet. A new deck feels like progress and is not. Choosing your first deck is worth doing well; choosing your third is procrastination.

A realistic timeline

For twenty minutes a day, honestly:

Week one: the structure. Four suits, ten numbers, four ranks, twenty-two trumps as a list.
Weeks two to three: the whole deck met once, via the drill, five new cards a day.
Months one to three: daily draws with a written line. Cards start arriving with associations attached.
Month three onward: the drill's gaps get long, you stop reaching for the cheat sheet, and you start reading spreads as sentences rather than lists.

Nobody finishes. Readers with twenty years still find new things in The Hermit. What changes is that the lookup stops.

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take to learn all 78 tarot cards? Meeting the whole deck takes about a fortnight with spaced repetition at five new cards a day. Getting them onto long recall intervals takes a few months of short daily sessions. Reading fluently takes longer and is a different skill.

Do I have to memorise every card? No. The forty numbered minors are ten numbers crossed with four suits, so you can construct them. Only the twenty-two majors and sixteen court cards genuinely need individual study.

What is spaced repetition? Being shown something just before you would have forgotten it. Correct answers push the card further away; wrong ones bring it back quickly, so revision time goes to what you do not know.

Should I learn reversals at the same time? No. Learn the seventy-eight upright meanings first. Reversals double the load and many experienced readers do not use them at all.

Is a cheat sheet cheating? No, and it is scaffolding rather than a destination. Use it to stop interrupting readings, then stop using it.

What is the fastest way to learn tarot? Structure first, then spaced repetition for recall, then one card a day in real context. Reading all seventy-eight pages in a weekend is the method most people try and the one that works least well.