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The hard ones for me were countries in mainland Africa, island nations in the Atlantic and the Pacific, and small adjacent countries that you associate in a group – say Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, or Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan.

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Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are easy - they go in alphabetical order from north to south.

Also, Estonia is closest to Finland, which makes sense since the languages are close.

and it makes sense that lithuania is the bottom one (ie, closest to poland), since there used to be a polish lithuanian commonwealth

Also Lat-via as in lateral makes me think of it in the middle.

For the 'stans, I remember TUTK (west to east), and that Turkmenistan is closest to Turkey.

The other way to remember is, if you can remember that Kazakhstan is the biggest, then it goes alphabetically clockwise.

Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan

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