I found the following method to be very useful
- Use a paper map, decently large to see names of street.
- Spend some time looking at it familiarizing with overal shape of the city area of interest (probably more useful for europe where city centers tend to be quite irregular)
- Mark your key points, where you live, where you work, where friends live etc.
- Walk around your area to discover places you will need (supermarket, small groceries shop, a bar, a laundry....). Mark some or all on the map. (not so much for future reference but because it forces you to think about where they are in relation to all the rest).
- Take one afternoon or more to just walk around a wider area (maybe the city center), pay attention to what you see, mark intersting spots on your phone (if you don't want to walk around map in hand), then transfer all on your paper map.
- Take every opportunity to walk to places (again, easier in Europe).
When I was a student at the university in Evanston, I had an internship (called co-op) at a company in Portland. I arrived on the airplane, got a pocket full of dimes, found a local newspaper and located a room to rent by nightfall.<p>While I had a car, I took pretty much every bus line to its end just to explore the city.<p>Since computer time was scarce back then, I went to the office about midnight or 2 am and worked till mid-morning. I lived close enough to walk. The route took me past a bakery, which of course was firing up at that hour, causing hunger pangs.<p>Sadly, this was before Powell's was invented.<p>I only knew one person there, and my social life was pretty limited.
I walked to places from my apartment. It seemed to make more of an impression on my memory -- like I'd actually "been" there more because I'd arrived under my own power.<p>After a while I could string together those places that I'd been into an "empiracal," experience-based sense of the city.
I've moved to a new city fairly recently and running / cycling has worked well for me. I regularly run during my lunch break which has helped me to get familiar with the road layout in and around the centre.<p>It's really helped make me feel more comfortable if I have to drive into or through the centre as I now recognise a lot of the roads.
Offline map (osmand~), i bookmark places I visit
I make sure I ask the patron's name (and to write a note about it in my bookmark), comes in useful if I happen to visit the place another time