People may think I'm crazy... but I developed a little technique for memorizing structures and amino acids it worked great
Kind of picture each of the a.a. as a person with distinct features and give them a name that corresponds to the a.a. Example is for phenylalanine the letter is F and I thought F looks like a fat guy (because of the phenol) so I named him Frank. Or another example is Leucine looks like a girl with pigtails to me so I named her Lucy. In the end I ended up with a friend from high school, my sister, the main character from American Beauty, the local crack head & his girlfriend, a computer science major, a business graduate, my mechanic, two best friends, my biochem professor, and some other completely random people. But I could never forget the a.a.
This may sound uber stupid, but it is an insanely effective much more so then tediously memorizing structures and names. I only had to look at each a.a. once and had it memorized after that. It took no time and it's easier to do it reverse. If you think of each as a 'face' then if you hear the name (like I hear phenylalanine I think of the name Frank and I picture that 'face') you will automatically know the structure. Makes it easy to memorize the pkas also. I only had to look at each once I swear and had each memorized and can draw them out from the name. I am not exaggerating. Just look at each until you can find a face and name in it and give it a personality. It will work. Think of how you can meet somebody one time and picture their entire face. A human face is a lot more complicated than the structure of an amino acid.
You may be skeptical if you are just learning them but trust me this works...
