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Guide 01

How to learn tarot

Most people who try to learn tarot start by memorizing card meanings, one at a time, from the little white booklet that came with the deck. Most of them quit somewhere in the middle of the Cups. There's a better way in: the deck is a system, and once you learn the system, most of the 78 meanings follow from it.

Updated July 2026·4 min read·Escapement LLC

Why tarot feels harder than it is

A tarot deck has 78 cards. Treated as 78 unrelated facts, that's a heavy memorization load, and heavier than it sounds, because every card also has shades of meaning that shift with context. Flashcard-style grinding works for a while, then the meanings start to blur together and the deck goes in a drawer.

The method is the problem. Nobody learns a language by reading a dictionary front to back; you learn grammar and vocabulary together, in small pieces, with a lot of practice. Tarot works the same way, because underneath the artwork the deck has a grammar.

The deck is a system

Here's the structure that the booklet-and-flashcards approach skips:

• The Major Arcana — 22 cards, the famous ones: the Fool, the Tower, Death, the Sun. These carry the big themes.
• The Minor Arcana — 56 cards in four suits: Wands (drive and creative fire), Cups (emotion and relationships), Swords (intellect and conflict), Pentacles (money, body, and craft).
• Each suit runs Ace through Ten, plus four court cards — Page, Knight, Queen, King.

That structure does most of the work for you. A minor card's meaning comes from two parts you can learn separately: what its suit is about, and what its number is about. Fives are about conflict and loss, so the Five of Cups is loss felt emotionally — grief, regret — while the Five of Wands is friction in action: competition, crossed purposes. Once you know four suits and ten numbers, you can read your way to a sensible meaning for 40 cards, before you've memorized anything card by card.

A study order that works

This is the order we built Little Grimoire around, and it's a sound order with any deck and a notebook:

1. Learn how a card is put together. Suits, numbers, courts, majors versus minors — the grammar above. This takes days, not months, and everything after it gets easier.
2. Go one suit at a time. Fourteen cards is a learnable chunk, and a suit is a story: Wands runs from the first spark of the Ace to the burden of the Ten. Learning cards inside that arc gives every card a place, which is what makes it stick. Finish a suit before starting the next.
3. Then the Major Arcana. The 22 majors are their own arc — the Fool's journey from innocence to wholeness. They're the most individual cards in the deck, so save them until reading by suit and number is a habit.
4. Spreads last. A spread is a sentence built from cards you can already read. Start with a one-card draw, move to three cards, and work up from there; how to read a tarot spread walks the whole range. The Celtic Cross can wait.

Practice beats rereading

Reading about a card feels like learning; it mostly isn't. What moves a meaning into memory is being asked: shown a card and made to answer for it, before you're shown the answer. Quiz yourself. Pull a card, say its meaning out loud, then check. Get it wrong, see it again tomorrow. Mixing recent cards with older ones matters too, or the old ones quietly leak away.

Ten minutes a day will carry you through the whole deck in a few months; a two-hour session every other weekend won't.

What about reversals?

Reversed cards — cards that come out of the shuffle upside down — read differently: blocked, turned inward, or overdone versions of the upright meaning. They're real and worth learning, eventually. Doubling your memorization load on day one is how decks end up in drawers. Read everything upright until the upright meanings feel solid, then add reversals suit by suit.

How long does it take?

With daily practice, expect to be reading simple spreads confidently in two to three months, and comfortable with the full deck — courts, majors, reversals — in six months to a year. Fluency keeps deepening for years after that, the way it does with any language. Anyone promising the whole deck in a weekend is selling flashcards.

Do you need a deck to start?

Eventually, yes: tarot is a physical practice, and shuffling is part of it. But you don't need one on day one, and you don't need the "right" one. The Rider–Waite–Smith deck (1909, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith) is the one most learning materials assume, ours included; its minor cards carry full scenes rather than abstract pips, which makes them far easier to learn from. If a different deck is the one that made you want to learn, start there. The structure transfers. Choosing a first deck — and everything else about day one — is covered in the tarot for beginners guide.