Maps are surely a fascinating tool for geographers and curious people, but they are just a little part of Geography.

First of all, Geography is a science, it is the study of the earth’s surface (in all its various aspects of it, e.g. extension, distribution, biological, social, …) and the relationship between people and their environments.

As we can state, Geography is much bigger than Cartography and Topography, since it adds the investigation of dynamics and causes of the position of the Earth in space caused by phenomena and based on its characteristics.

From Wikipedia :

Cartography is the set of scientific, technical, and artistic knowledge aimed at the representation, symbolic, but truthful, on flat (geographical maps) or spherical (globes) supports, of geographical, statistical, demographic, economic, political, cultural, relative to the geographic space represented. Topography is the science that has as its purpose the determination and metric representation through drawing a map with conventional signs of the Earth’s surface. There are several branches of Geography, by the way, this intro was just for making clear that learning country maps it’s different from learning Geography.

If you are interested in learning more about Geography you should consider these resources :

• Crash Course Geography from CrashCourse on YouTube, seems the best way to start, I can’t wait for watching it.

• Other must lectures are “Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place)“, and “The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World” both by Tim Marshall.

• “Geografia umana. Un approccio visuale“, by Alyson L. Greiner, Giuseppe Dematteis and Carla Lanza. I found only the italian version of this book (I still have to read this).

  • As an alternative, this seems similar to “Human Geography A Spatial Perspective AP Edition” by Sarah Bednarz, Mark Bockenhauer, and Fredrik Hiebert.

Why should we learn the world map?

From elementary school to middle school Geography is taught in general terms about the seas and the land. But after this time in school, this wonderful subject isn’t taught anymore, leaving it in the most incomplete manner possible.

My personal experience was that at the end of these classes I still had no idea how countries were positioned in the world.

Geography is not considered as important as Math, English, History, and other core subjects, by the way, is a tool that gives you an important enrichment to a well-rounded education.

A list of things we still don’t know about the normal scholastic system:

• The spatial position of world countries
• The spatial position of seas
• World capitals
• The flags of the countries
• The current wars

Exactly, wars, and modern Geography if studied from the correct resources (which will be given on this page) can tell you a lot about the current global situation of the world, this will result in a knowledge boost if you are willing to study History (and you probably should).

Why you should study geography?

You could study the world map just to impress people, but this isn’t the main superpower that is given by Geography, there are many others. If you know better Geography you can understand better Politics, History, and also human behavior.

There are many types of Geography, one is also called mathematical geography, it’s okay we won’t go into that 😋; we are interested in physical geography, which is the study of the physical characteristics of the land like climate, water distribution, and natural resources.

If you want to have a better economical and political idea, you should study physical geography for mainly two things

1. Spatial awareness on the globe
2. Natural resources awareness

The first will hugely impact your world of view because you were considering only the continent in which you are inhabiting and not the world as a whole. The second is complementary to the first one for understanding why some places are really important to the global market.

How you should study the world map?

There is much software out there, I prepared this program of application to use that works kinda like an intensive memorization course of maps for complete beginners.

Let’s try to attack the first point, we want to gain awareness about where the countries are placed, and possibly where their capital is also placed.

The first software you will use is Google Maps, this was obvious but it is essential for exploring in-depth the countries and cities that you are going to study with other software. Many of these are android apps and are developed by Andrey Solovyev (this is the blog of all his games), except the last one which is a deck for Anki (if you don’t know what is Anki, you should read this article by Michael Owen on active recall, and this from Farnam Street for spaced repetition).

I put there an ordered list of the applications I suggest respecting the ordering to have a better learning experience.

1. All maps quiz
2. World flags quiz
3. World capitals quiz
4. Ultimate Geography v5.1 Anki Deck

First, install the map quizzes on the smartphone and Google Maps on the PC and now I explain to you why. Use the application and complete all the levels, in each application of Solovyev you have some stars to complete, you can complete them by completing various quizzes for each section. In all applications, the world is divided by continents, which is a big plus for the learning process, I highly recommend studying by continents from the easiest to the hardest.

The hardest is a subjective thing, probably are just the most distant continent from you 😀.

The first rush you are doing with the application to each new country you see move to Google Maps and check the neighborhood, try to remember which are the neighbors of the country you studied without looking at the map. If possible, read something about this country, this will help create a model of the country in the brain. Something that you could read about the country is :

Language Which kind of politics History Food Religion Music Tradition Art Architecture This is a really important step to do at the start, because this is a learning process, and after that, the rest of the applications we will use are for memorization, and you memorize much better once you learn something more about what we are talking instead of just memorizing it like a phone number.

For the flags application, there is nothing much to say, some flags are really similar and you should study these particular cases, check this link. Study these corner cases (visualize with closed eyes and spelling their differences should help) and you should be fine for the quiz.

The last quiz could be the hardest, in my case it’s hard to associate names with other names and memorize them, thanks to this application it becomes easier because there are some images of the country. Of course, for a real study of this country, if you just know the name could be useless, you should try to integrate some notes for better learning. But this isn’t always possible for everybody, so you should just try to memorize it and hope that someday you will reuse it.

The last step (4) is the real killer of this study, you are using pure active recall, there are no multiple selections and there are no letters for writing the answer. You have just to speak out loud (or in your mind) the answer and then check if it is correct. Thanks to spatial repetition and how the application is tuned you will have more time for practicing harder questions. This Anki Deck contains everything:

• Oceans and seas
• Continents
• Maps
• Capitals
• Territories (currently updated and in case of error anyone can propose a solution on the GitHub repository)

For the deck there is a filtered deck feature to focus your study on a subset of cards, for instance, you would like to study all the Europe first.

How about resources?

We want to learn also how world resources are distributed, this is a hard thing to do. There are no applications but many online resources that we can follow for having an idea of how the world resources are subdivided in 2022.

• 10 Countries With the Most Natural Resources from Investopedia.
• Natural Resources Maps from MoW (Maps of World) which is under MapSherpa (Canada, Ottawa) a Map Distributor. The CEO (and Product Owner) is Dave McIlhagga got a BA in Geography and the company got founded in 1998 (24 years today 30/09/2022).
• A collection of posts from Natural Geographic.

The true size of the countries on the map

What is shown is not the true size of the countries, there is a polar distortion that occurs in the countries since the flattened map that we usually see is taken from the globe and flattened. For checking the real-world size of a map you should go on thetruesize.com, select a country and move around to see the distortion from the poles with respect to the equator.

What is the next step in learning geography? Is not over yet, the next step for deepening our learning is to learn the internal regions of the countries that we previously learned about. Also, an important part is the culture of these countries that now we know, you should spend most of the time studying this.

The aim of this post is to lay the groundwork for those who didn’t have it in elementary school (I’m sure a great many of us won’t) and move up from it.

These will serve to give a sense of what is being talked about when dealing with the topics of geopolitics, current affairs, etc.

I hope it can be useful, please leave a comment if there are any problems with this post or information that can be added, as this resource could be reused over time as geography through changes over the years, in its majority, passes the test of time.