When I was young the allure of the cards drew me.  But at 15 I had my own problems trying to remember the Major Arcana, much less the Minor ones.

In the end, I wound up associating the card with a picture on it to remember what it stood for. For example, the two of cups is a card of friendship, and you can see that in the Rider/Waite deck as two friends having a drink together.  As I learned more and started to get into the less generic meanings, I learned that it’s a card of friendship especially between women (or platonic) as the women show.

If you do this once a day with each card, eventually the meanings become easy to associate with the pictures and becomes second nature when you’re doing your own readings.

But if you’re not using the standard Rider/Waite deck, and something more like The Russian Tarot of St. Petersburg, it becomes a little more challenging, since these cards are often more detailed then other decks.  In that case, take what pops out at you, in this example the Death card, and you see a skull rotting in the midst of other signs of war.  Correlate the imagery of the skull rotting (and this is a somewhat dark deck) to transformation: the skin transforms the skull into dust which will remind you what it means.

Learning a simple spread makes this easy to do on the fly as well.  The Celtic cross is the most common one and you can apply the same tricks to the positions as you have the cards.  Since cards 3 and 4 are what’s obstacles that are just recently over and things to consider ahead respectively, thinking of things you buried (Card 3) and things that are going to fall on you (Card 4) can make reading the tarot a matter of association then a difficult task you lay out for yourself.

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