Guide
How to memorize all the countries of the world
Not by staring at a map. The order below splits the world into pieces you can actually finish, and every piece has a checked list on this site to test yourself against.
The short version: test first, learn in continent-sized chunks, then space the reviews. Manymo runs each chunk as a timed round.
First, 193 or 195?
You will meet both numbers. 193 is the number of United Nations member states. 195 adds the two permanent observer states, the Holy See and the State of Palestine. Quizzes that say 197 are usually adding Taiwan and Kosovo as well. None of these counts is wrong, they are answers to slightly different questions. The lists on this site use the 193 UN member states, and say so on the page.
Step 1: find out what you already know
Before you study anything, sit down with a blank page and write every country you can name. No map, no atlas, no phone. The list will come out fast for a while and then stop, fairly abruptly.
That stopping point matters more than the score. Everything you produced is already in memory and needs almost no work. The gap is your actual syllabus, and for most people it clusters in the same regions: West and Central Africa, Central Asia, and the island states of the Pacific and the Caribbean.
Step 2: split the world into pieces you can finish
Nobody learns 193 names as one block, and trying to is how people quit in week one. Work through it in this order, easiest first, so that every stage ends in something finished:
Africa is where most of the missing names live, so it looks like the hard stage and is in fact the profitable one. Fifty four countries taken as one project, over a week, is worth more than another month of vaguely rereading a world map.
Asia, North America and Oceania have no separate list here. They are covered inside the 193 answer world list, and by the time you reach it the other three continents are already carrying most of your score.
Step 3: produce, do not reread
This is the part that decides whether any of it sticks. Reading a labelled map trains recognition: you see Namibia and think yes, Namibia. That feels like learning and is almost useless, because a test never shows you the answer first.
Producing the names from an empty page is the harder exercise and the one that transfers. The rule is simple: every time you look at a list, close it and write the list out afterwards. Being unable to finish is not a failed session, it is the session working.
Step 4: chain neighbours, not alphabets
Alphabetical order gives you nothing to hold on to. Geography does. Walk a border in your head and let each country hand you the next one:
- Across Europe: Portugal, Spain, France, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine.
- Down the Atlantic coast of Africa: Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria.
- Down the Andes: Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and then back up through Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil.
Two or three chains per continent cover most of the mainland. What is left over is islands, and islands are a separate, short job: the Caribbean, the Atlantic off West Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific.
Step 5: learn the name traps deliberately
A handful of entries cost people a whole list, every time, and none of them are hard once you have met them:
| The entry | What trips people up |
|---|---|
| Eswatini | Renamed from Swaziland in 2018. Both are still in circulation. |
| Czechia | The short form of the Czech Republic, and the one most lists now use. |
| Myanmar | Formerly Burma. Older atlases and many speakers still say Burma. |
| Timor-Leste | Also written East Timor. Independent since 2002 and easy to skip entirely. |
| The two Congos | The Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Kinshasa) are two separate countries. Naming only one leaves you exactly one short. |
| North Macedonia | Renamed from Macedonia in 2019. |
| Cabo Verde | Also written Cape Verde. One of the six African island states that get forgotten as a group. |
Manymo accepts every one of these under both names, so a naming argument never costs you a point. It is still worth knowing which form is current.
Step 6: space the reviews
A list you cleared today is not learned yet. Run it again tomorrow, again at the end of the week, then again a month later. Three short repeats beat one long session, and each repeat costs a couple of minutes rather than an evening.
This is also the stage where an app beats a printed list, because the scoring and the streak do the scheduling that you would otherwise have to remember to do yourself.
A four week plan
| Week | Target | Daily work |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | South America (12) and the EU (27) | Two runs a day. Both lists should be full clears by the weekend. |
| 2 | All of Europe (47) | One Europe run daily, plus one week 1 list to keep it warm. |
| 3 | Africa (54) | Split it: north and west on odd days, east and south on even days. |
| 4 | The full 193 | One full run daily. Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific are what is left, so work the misses list after each run. |
The lists on this page are the ones in the app
Manymo runs each of them as a timed round: type what you remember, no multiple choice, and the answers you missed are shown at the end with a fact on each one.
Free on iPhone, iOS 18 or later. South America, Europe and Africa are free lists. The 193 country world list is part of Manymo Pro, a single $4.99 purchase. Works offline, no account.