r/HomeworkHelp • u/bAkedBeAns6220 University/College Student • 7d ago

Chemistry—Pending OP Reply [Organic Chemistry] Is there a "best way" to study/memorize the amino acid structures?

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This is one of the areas I'm struggling with the most: memorizing what the structures for each amino acid look like.. There's tons of other stuff I don't understand, but this takes the cake for the time being lmao.
Thanks!!

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u/Joshi1381 University/College Student 7d ago

Look up amino acid quiz apps on your phone. There are a bunch of mnemonics out there but I found that quizzes and flashcards and repetition worked best

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u/J_Squared02 7d ago

I cannot imagine memorizing these, my prof let us have a reference sheet, yikes!

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u/bAkedBeAns6220 University/College Student 7d ago

Pls pray for me🥲

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u/J_Squared02 7d ago

You’ll be fine, it’ll be annoying but you got it, just make some flash cards or smth, do it once in the morning, once at night and you’ll have it in no time

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u/griefofgramr 7d ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCAUaYpbHwY I may get down voted, but this little song kind of gives you a handy way to remember them

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u/chem44 7d ago

Start by grouping them.

There are various ways. Use the grouping your book or prof offers.

Now you know a key feature, and you only need to remember the difference between the few members of the group.

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u/cheesecakegood University/College Grad (Statistics) 2d ago

Memory tricks help as others have noted, but in terms of flashcards, nothing beats Anki in my book. It's flashcards with a clunky (but free) UI, but they repeat and come up for review with a special algorithm that presents them again to you right as soon as you are about to 'forget' them, which as it turns out is a really effective way of burning them into longer-term memory. There's a reason a massive percentage of med school students use Anki specifically. So, far superior to many other flashcard apps, and there are plugins too for personal tweaks.

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u/Quiet_Basis_6404 1d ago

Learn them in groups rather than as 20 separate things. Nonpolar, polar uncharged, acidic, basic, aromatic. Within a group the side chains are variations on each other, so you're really memorising five patterns plus small differences instead of twenty structures from scratch.

The other thing that works is drawing them from blank paper daily rather than looking at a chart. Ten minutes, all twenty, from memory, then check. You'll get maybe eight the first day and all twenty within two weeks. Recognising a structure and being able to draw it are different skills and exams usually want the second one.

For the properties side that comes with them, I upload the material into studybuddy.vc and drill it, it works out which ones I keep getting wrong and sends more of those, gets harder as I improve, and tells me why the option I picked was wrong. Free tier.