One card a day for ten weeks
learning pace
A slow learning plan based on the structure of suits and numbers, with the five-minute daily exercise that sustains it.
The deck has seventy-eight cards. At one a day, resting at weekends, you go through it all in about fifteen weeks, and if you work Saturdays and Sundays too, in a little over ten. That is the whole plan. The hard part isn't the content, it's not trying to speed it up.
The daily exercise takes five minutes. You draw a card, look at it for a full minute without consulting anything and describe out loud what you see: what the figure is doing, where it's looking, which colours dominate, what it stirs in you. Then you read what your book or guide says. You write two lines: your description and what surprised you about the official version. You close the notebook.
That distance between the two versions is the learning. If they match, the card is already yours. If your description has nothing to do with it, that's not a failure, it's the gap that will close over time. The cards that resist most are usually the ones touching something personal, and it's worth noting which they are.
There are two structural shortcuts that save weeks. The first is the suits: Cups for bonds and emotions, Pentacles for the material and the everyday, Swords for thought, conflict and speech, Wands for drive and projects. The second is the numbers: Aces open, twos pair, threes expand, fours stabilise, fives complicate, sixes rebalance, sevens test, eights accelerate or trap, nines accumulate, tens close. With those two lists you can say something sensible about any Minor Arcanum you've never seen.
The twenty-two Major Arcana take more time because each has its own world. A practical option is to mix them in, one Major every three or four Minors, rather than doing blocks. That way you see the contrast between the big scale and the everyday one.
What derails the plan is starting long spreads in the second week, getting frustrated at not understanding them and abandoning both things. Keep study practice and real spreads separate. One card a day is study. Spreads are for when there's a genuine question and the will to sit with it.