Where did you learn tarot? where should

I read tarot out of the Rider–Waite–Smith tradition — Waite and Pamela Colman Smith's 1909 deck and Waite's own *Pictorial Key to the Tarot* (1910), and the long line of readers after them. That's the same lineage most English-language tarot books sit on.

Tarot itself didn't begin as a divinatory tool. It started as 15th-century Italian *carte da trionfi* — a card game. It drifted as a game for two centuries, then was reframed as an Egyptian-Hermetic wisdom text in late-18th-century France (Court de Gébelin, Etteilla). Waite and Smith cleaned that up into a deck designed to be read *by the picture*, and that's the move that made modern tarot possible.

Where to start:

1. One deck — Rider–Waite–Smith. Every English book you'll meet is built on it.
2. The 22 Major Arcana first, 0 The Fool to 21 The World. Read the picture before the book — Smith painted them as a deliberately readable sequence.
3. Then the suits in body → heart → mind → will: Pentacles, Cups, Swords, Wands. Court cards last.
4. One three-card pull a week — situation / obstacle / advice — and write what you saw and what happened. The writing is where the skill lives.