How To Learn Chess Coordinates

You're likely already familiar with the coordinate trainer. If you're from chess.com, the coordinate trainer there has a couple of disadvantages -- you can't turn off the clock, and you can't exclusively drill a selection of squares. That's exactly what I'm going to suggest -- use the lichess coordinate trainer with the timer disabled and with only the 4th and 5th ranks selected. Then, when prompted with a coordinate, close your eyes and ask yourself the square color and where the square is. After making your best guess, open your eyes and then click your chosen square. If you got it wrong, mindfully observe the true square color and position, click it, and then continue.

Repeat that process until you've learned those center squares. If I remember right, it took me a few hundred repetitions. Then, if you'd like, you can include the 5th and 6th ranks as well. That's where I stopped, because it was getting pretty tedious by then, even for me. After that, you should have a pretty strong foundation, enough to infer square color and position for any other square on the board, not just those you've drilled. At that point, it should be easier to read coordinates from chess books as well.

Then again, it might be better to just skip all of this entirely and go directly to a chess book, and just learn the coordinates by playing out the algebraic moves on a chess board. That way you'd learn other stuff at the same time instead of mindlessly drilling coordinates like I did. I don't know which is better, but I can tell you from experience that this method definitely works.