Learn the State Capitals of Mexico, Brazil and India: 87 Flashcards and a Different Trap in Each Country

World States & Capitals (deck code DE7108, 87 cards) covers the first-level subdivisions of three federal giants: the 32 federal entities of Mexico (cards 1–32), the 26 states plus the Federal District of Brazil (33–59) and the 28 states of India (60–87). Mexico and Brazil are complete. India includes no union territories, so Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh and Puducherry are missing.

Sample cards

A different trap in each country

Mexico: free points and long names. Twelve states share their name with their capital: Aguascalientes, Chihuahua, Colima, Guanajuato, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, and, in their short forms, Campeche, Durango, Oaxaca, Puebla, Querétaro and Tlaxcala. The deck uses the official long forms (San Francisco de Campeche, Victoria de Durango, Oaxaca de Juárez, Puebla de Zaragoza, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Culiacán Rosales). Learn the short name and treat the honorific as a bonus. The real work is the 19 states where the names differ: Saltillo, Hermosillo, Tepic, Chilpancingo, Pachuca, Toluca, Villahermosa, Chetumal, Mérida. Mexico City has been a federal entity since 2016, no longer a "Distrito Federal". It is still not a state.

Brazil: the hints do the work. Every Brazilian card has a hint with the state's two-letter code and history: Acre bought from Bolivia in 1903, Mato Grosso do Sul split off in 1977, Tocantins carved out of Goiás in 1988. Read the hints. They group the states into the original captaincies (Bahia, Pernambuco, Maranhão) and the 1988 newcomers (Amapá, Roraima, Tocantins). Two figures are out of date. Rewrite those cards with the 2022 IBGE census: São Paulo has about 44.4 million people, not "46+", and Roraima about 637,000, not 761,012.

India: shared and split capitals. Chandigarh serves both Punjab and Haryana, and it is a union territory itself. Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand each have two seats (Uttarakhand: Dehradun and Gairsain). Andhra Pradesh shared Hyderabad until June 2024, and Amaravati is still being built. Card 73 reads "Mumbai (largest city: Mumbai)". Shorten it to Mumbai. Watch out for the renamed cities too: Bengaluru, Thiruvananthapuram, Chennai, Kolkata.

Study plan

Drill one country at a time, shuffled inside its block, and only then mix all 87. Then add a reverse pass (capital → state). Several capitals are also cities elsewhere: La Paz (Baja California Sur, and Bolivia's seat of government), Mérida (Venezuela and Spain) and Victoria. A reverse card forces you to name which one you mean.

Once these subdivisions are solid, zoom out with Countries by Continent, or go one more country down with the capitals of China's provinces.

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