Merken

I have just seen this sentence “Ich hoffe ich kann mir alle Zutaten merken" = "I hope I can remember all the ingredients”.

1. Why do we add “mir” here? Is that because “merken” is a dative verb?

2. When would you use “erinnern” instead of merken
 

According to Leo, merken is a reflexive verb when it is used to mean "to memorise, make a note of, or remember", and the reflexive pronoun is dative.

According to Langenschiet when it is used to mean "to remember something", erinnern is a synonym, so I guess you could use it in this case.

Hallo RexV und sfpugh!

Just to add on to sfpugh's answer - if we want to get specific, erinnern has the meaning of "to recall" and merken has the meaning of "to place in memory." So using merken in the sentence above means that we are hoping to place everything into our memory now. If we were to change this to erinnern, it would mean that we are hoping that we can recall everything later.

We don't really make this kind of distinction in English, so these two verbs are both simply translated as "to remember." Their difference in meaning is subtle, and is likely to not really be an issue in most cases.

(Note also that the example sentence is missing a comma: Ich hoffe, ich kann mir alle Zutaten merken.)

I hope that this is helpful! 

Tschüss!

Liss