Every time exams come around, you are told to make a proper schedule, wake up early, drink water, be the responsible and disciplined child. And then somehow, many of you end up on your bed every night around 2 am with zero new information in your brain, but a detailed colour-coded schedule that you made instead of actually studying.

Perhaps it’s not wrong. You have the motivation to start your studies accordingly. Whether you actually studied or the schedule became the whole project, at least you started. But there is a specific type of student with the most organised notes, the most colour-coded timetable, the neatest desk setup and, somehow, they actually do study.

So that leaves the rest of us — the big lot — the students who also genuinely try, sacrifice sleep, panic-watch YouTube lectures and explanations. But the results still don’t match the effort they put in, leaving them confused and demoralised.

What makes their efforts fail? Mostly, it’s study methods that don’t work. The pressure is on vigorous study, giving long hours, reading again and trying harder, but they were never taught how to actually study.

Recently, a new buzz among Gen Z and Alpha is study methods inspired by Chinese or Japanese cultures. These methods have been working in their original countries for decades. But do they actually work for us? For our world of notifications, 30-second videos and group chats that never stop?

The answer is yes, but only if you understand what these methods actually are, and not just the beautiful version of them you saw in a TikTok/YouTube video with a person sitting at a perfectly organised desk at 5 am.

THE KUMON METHOD

Why reading your notes six times does basically nothing

Think of the moment you read a page and thought, “Oh, I know this.” And if you thought you learnt it, the truth is, you didn’t. It was your brain recognising something it has seen before. Recognition and actually knowing something are completely different things, and passive studying tricks you into confusing the two.

You read the same page again. It feels familiar. Your brain goes, “Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen this.” And you tick the topic in your head and move on.

But exams need you to produce that information from scratch, in your own words, from what you learnt. And when you do, suddenly nothing comes to mind. And whatever comes is mostly broken and makes no sense because your brain never held onto it. It just had to recognise it while looking at it.

To curb this frustration, in 1954, a mathematics teacher, Toru Kumon, in Japan, developed what became known as the Kumon Method, originally to help his own son get better at maths. In this method, you study, then you close the book or put the notes away, and then try to write down or say out loud everything you just learnt, without looking.

You will be shocked to see how little you actually remember. And that struggle to remember is exactly where your brain tries to pull information out. Even unsuccessfully, it creates stronger memory connections than passively reading the same thing ten times.

The whole idea is simple. You don’t move to the next thing until you actually know the current topic from your memory. The method spread across Japan and eventually worldwide because it worked, not because it was complicated. It was actually very simple.

KAIZEN

Stop trying to study everything in one night

Kaizen translates roughly to continuous improvement in personal life, home life and workplace efficiency. It originally came from the business and manufacturing world in Japan after World War II. But the idea behind it is so straightforward that it applies to almost anything, including studying.

Kaizen is not a complete transformation, nor is it about changing your entire life or waking up at 5 am. It’s about making things slightly better every single day without stopping.

In studying, this becomes very practical. Instead of trying to cover everything in one massive session because exams are just a few days away, you focus on one small thing you didn’t understand yesterday and try to understand it a little better today.

That’s it. One concept or one topic. This small, consistent progress every day actually builds something that stays.

Although this sounds too slow and cramming feels productive, cramming is the opposite of Kaizen. It exhausts your brain and creates the feeling that you have done a lot. However, in reality, only a few bits remain in memory, the core of the topic just evaporates.

SPACED REPETITION

Why do songs stick in your head but your notes don’t?

There is a reason you can remember every word of a song you haven’t heard in three years, but can’t remember what you studied last Tuesday in your geography class. It’s just how memory works. Memory fades unless it gets reinforced at the right moments.

Spaced repetition is the practice of reviewing material across increasing time gaps. You study something today. You look at it again in two or three days. Then a week later. Then maybe two weeks after that. Each time you review something you’re about to forget, you strengthen it and it lasts longer before it starts fading again.

This is deeply embedded in Japanese study culture. You spend the least effort for the most retention because you’re studying at exactly the right moment. Even 10 or 15 minutes of reviewing a topic from last week keeps it alive in your brain. You study it, revisit it again and again, and it eventually becomes something you actually know rather than something you vaguely recognise.

THE SHUCHU

The phone is not the enemy, your habit around it is

Every study advice article eventually gets here, and so does mine. I know this is the point where Gen Z and Alpha get irritated. But there’s a reason it keeps coming up.

Whatever activities we participate in, the environment around us is highly responsible for the outcome. And when it comes to studies, we already know that they require more attention than anything else. So when a phone is on the desk, even face down, your brain is still aware of it.

There is an invisible pull towards it. There’s actual research on this, not just vibes. The mere presence of your phone nearby takes up cognitive space because part of your brain is managing the temptation to check it. That part of your brain could be working on what you’re trying to learn.

This is where the concept of Shuchu comes in. Shuchu means deep, concentrated focus. It is built on the idea that focus isn’t just willpower. It’s something you train through consistency: same place, same time, same activity. After a while, your brain stops fighting it and just shifts into study mode when the conditions are right.

Trust me, putting the phone in another room for 40 minutes or giving it to someone in your family works. All other distractions, like the TV, music player, game box, etc, should be kept away so that you have fewer distractions. Remove the option and the problem mostly solves itself.

ACTIVE RECALL

I’m not going to tell you to wake up at 4 am. I’m not going to suggest a four-hour morning study block, because that’s not realistic for most people and, even if you did it once, you’d burn out and quit.

Something that actually works and doesn’t require becoming a different person: start by spending 10 minutes trying to recall what you covered yesterday. No notes open. Just you and a blank page. Write down everything that comes to mind. You can write words, sentences, topics, key points and what goes inside them. This feels like a slow start, but you’re actually doing the most important thing, which is making your brain retrieve information under mild pressure.

Then do a focused study block on new material. Forty minutes is good. If you can’t concentrate for 40 minutes, start with 20 and build up. Take a real break afterwards. Lie down, eat something, go outside. Don’t scroll, because that doesn’t actually rest your brain, it just switches what it’s processing.

Come back for another block. At the end of the session, before you close everything, spend five minutes trying to recall the main points of what you just studied. Close the notes and test yourself.

Then, over the week, keep going back to things you covered earlier. Not big review sessions, just a few questions or a quick recall exercise on something from three or four days ago. This method builds on how memory actually works, which is more than most study routines can say.

Final thoughts…

You don’t need to overhaul your life. You need to stop cramming and start testing yourself. None of this is complicated. Most of it is uncomfortable at first because it removes the comfortable feeling of fake productivity. But that discomfort is just actual learning starting.

The goal isn’t to have a perfect study session every time. The goal is that your routine doesn’t break. Because a routine that survives bad days is the only kind that actually works.

Published in Dawn, Young World, April 25th, 2026