You remember things best if they are at the beginning or the end of the list. The serial-position effect is a memory effect discovered by the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (see also forgetting curve). He discovered that we remember items (words, facts, etc.) from a list better if they are at the beginning or the end of the list. This is especially true if one is allowed to determine the order of reproduction themselves (see image). The better recall of words at the beginning of the list is the primacy effect. The better recall of the last words in the list is called the recency effect. An explanation for the primacy effect is that those items receive relatively the most attention, so they are repeated more often. This helps you remember it better (see retrieval practice and forgetting curve). An explanation for the recency effect is that those items were mentioned most recently and are therefore stored in short-term memory. These items are better remembered because they are, as it were, still fresh in the memory.
Yoo, J. & Kaushanskaya, M. (2016). Serial-position effects on a free-recall task in bilinguals. Memory, 24(3), 409-422. doi:10.1080/09658211.2015.1013557