How to Learn Times Tables Fast: Hear It, Drill It, Flip It, Fill It In

Almost every child "knows" their tables on Monday and forgets them by Thursday. That is not a memory problem — it is a route problem. A fact learned one way, by chanting, has one path into memory. A fact learned four ways has four. Here is how to build all four for every table from ×1 to ×20, with a two-week plan you can actually follow.

Why chanting alone does not stick

Reciting "seven threes are twenty-one" trains the sequence, not the fact. Ask a child who has only chanted "what is 7 × 3?" and watch them run the whole table from the start to get there. Ask them "7 × ? = 21" and they are lost. The fact is stored as a song, not as a piece of knowledge you can reach from any direction.

The fix is to store each fact several ways: heard, seen, recalled cold, and reconstructed from a gap.

The four routes

1. Hear it

Listening is the fastest way to load a table into memory and the one most children skip. In Level 4 of Abacus Kids, the table panel on every table's page reads each line aloud — "7 times 3 equals 21" — when you tap it, or the whole table in sequence when you tap the heading. Ten seconds of listening at the start of a session is worth several minutes of drilling.

2. Drill it

Ten quick multiple-choice questions on the table, four options each. This is the classic "do you know it" check, and doing it right after listening turns the sound into a fact. In the app this is Learn & Drill.

3. Flip it

Flashcards are different from a drill, because there are no options to lean on. The card shows 7 × 3 = ?. The child has to produce the answer from nothing, then flips to check and marks it Got it! or Try Again. Self-grading matters — a child who admits "try again" is learning where their gaps are.

4. Fill the gap

The last route is the one that catches the chanters: the fact with a piece missing. 7 × ___ = 21. To answer, the child has to reach the fact from the answer side, which is exactly what division and algebra will ask later. The app's Fill the Blanks alternates between hiding the answer and hiding the multiplier, ten questions, four choices, with a timer so you can watch the time come down.

The two-week plan

Ten minutes a day. One table at a time.

| Days | Do | Move on when | |---|---|---| | 1–2 | Listen to the whole table twice. Learn & Drill once. | Drill scores 8+. | | 3–4 | Listen once. Flashcard Quiz. Note any "Try Again" cards. | Fewer than three "Try Again". | | 5–6 | Fill the Blanks. This is where the gaps show. | 9 or 10 out of 10. | | 7 | Fill the Blanks again, cold — no listening first. | 9 or 10 again → table done. | | 8–14 | Next table, same shape. Once a week, a Mix Table Practice round covering everything learned so far. | — |

Two weeks, two tables — and both of them stored four ways. That is slower than chanting a table a day and far faster than re-learning the same tables every term.

Which tables, in which order

Not 1 to 20 in a row. Try:

1. ×2, ×5, ×10 — the easy patterns build confidence.
2. ×3, ×4 — the first real memorising.
3. ×6, ×7, ×8, ×9 — the hard core. Go slowly here and use Mix Table Practice on ×6–×10 to keep earlier ones alive.
4. ×11 to ×20 — usually smoother than parents expect, because so many facts are already known from the other direction (×12 contains ×2 through ×9 answers).

Abacus Kids has a Mix Table Practice mode with groups for exactly this — ×1–×3, ×1–×5, ×6–×10, ×1–×10, ×11–×15, ×15–×20 and ×1–×20 — so review rounds are one tap.

How this connects to the abacus

Times tables are the bridge between Add & Subtract and the multiplication levels of Abacus Practice. A child who knows 7 × 3 = 21 cold can set 21 on the beads without thinking about it, and multi-digit multiplication on the abacus becomes a sequence of table facts placed on the right rods. The tables are not a separate subject — they are what makes the next abacus level possible.

For parents: what not to do

• Don't test cold on day one. Listen first, always.
• Don't drill a table that scored ten. Move on and let Mix Table Practice keep it warm.
• Don't chase the timer. Fill the Blanks shows elapsed time so you can watch it fall over a week. It is a progress signal, not a target.