Shape and colour do the talking.
Ontario road signs follow a system. Learning the system beats memorising the signs.
Three jobs, three families.
Every sign is doing one of three jobs. Regulatory signs tell you what the law requires or forbids here. Warning signs tell you about a condition ahead so you can prepare for it. Information and direction signs tell you where things are. Deciding which family a sign belongs to narrows its meaning before you have read a single word on it.
Shape carries meaning on its own.
An octagon is a stop sign. An upside-down triangle asks you to yield. A diamond warns. An X-shaped crossbuck marks a railway crossing. Shape is the part you can still read when a sign is dirty, snow-covered, backlit, or a long way off, which is exactly when you most need to know what it says.
Colour tells you the timeframe.
Yellow warns about a condition that is part of the road. Orange warns about something temporary, usually a work zone, and the difference matters because temporary conditions change between the day you drive a route and the next. Green guides and directs. A red circle with a diagonal slash prohibits whatever is pictured; a green ring permits or requires it.
Know what our sign questions do not test.
Our sign questions describe signs in words rather than showing the artwork, so they test whether you can reason from shape, colour and symbol. That is useful, and it is not the same as recognising a sign on sight. Visual recognition still needs the illustrations in the official handbook, so read the signs chapter alongside this practice rather than instead of it.