Telling flags apart
Most flags are easy once you know what to look at. The hard ones come in families, and each family has one detail that settles it.
Stripes: count them and check the direction
Many flags are three stripes. First ask whether they run across or up and down, then read the colours in order. Ireland is green, white and orange from the flagpole; Côte d’Ivoire is the same three colours in the opposite order. Italy and Mexico share green, white and red, but Mexico has its coat of arms in the middle.
The Netherlands and Luxembourg both show red, white and blue across; the blue of Luxembourg is lighter and its flag is longer in reality. In a quiz, the shade of blue is the detail to watch.
Crosses of the north
Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland all use a cross shifted towards the flagpole. Separate them by colour: red with white for Denmark, blue with yellow for Sweden, white with blue for Finland, and red, white and blue for Norway and Iceland, where the field colour decides: red for Norway, blue for Iceland.
Colour families
Red, green, yellow and black appear together in many African flags. Red, white, green and black are the colours of many Arab flags, as in Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. Within a family, the shape decides: a triangle at the flagpole, a star, the position of a band.
When the colours do not settle it, look for symbols. A crescent, a sun, a dragon, a cedar tree or a coat of arms rules out most of the candidates at once.
The pairs that are almost identical
Chad and Romania use blue, yellow and red in vertical stripes; the blues differ only slightly. Indonesia and Monaco are both red over white. At quiz size these pairs cannot be told apart reliably, so they are never offered in the same question here. Learn them as facts: if the question says Romania and the options show one of these flags, it is the one.
Senegal and Mali both stripe green, yellow and red; only Senegal adds a small green star on the yellow band. Australia and New Zealand both have the Union Flag and stars; Australia has white stars, New Zealand red ones with a white border.
Practise with purpose
Play the flags quiz on Hard: there the wrong options are chosen among neighbours and flags with a similar layout, which trains exactly these differences. Each country page also lists the flags its own flag is most often confused with.