In this article, the authors discuss some analytic and mnemonic strategies that help first-year students of interpreting acquire the basic skills for interpreting a given text. Lecturers of interpreting at the School of Translating and Interpreting in Granada usually devote the first term of this course to training students to listen to and understand different types of texts. The authors thus cover one of the three phases that, according to Seleskovitch, make up the process of interpreting: “Comprehension”. One of the problems they are faced with at the first stage is the fact that the students’ knowledge of the world is rather limited: 17 to 18-year-old students find it very difficult to grasp the overall meaning of a text; they rely heavily on words and have not yet learnt how to process content. This has led the authors to examine the possibilities of providing them with some analytic strategies to make up for their inappropriate approach to the technique of interpreting. The importance of the role played both by memory and analysis in this phase has been stressed by most scholars of interpreting.