What is K-FRU?
A system to study Japanese kanji based on mnemonics
“Kanji – For the Rest of Us” (K-FRU) is a systematic method that uses mnemonics to help you study kanji. A mnemonic is a way to remember something. For example, to remember the colors in a rainbow (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet) you could use the mnemonic “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain.”
Each mnemonic sentence in K-FRU will help you remember not only what a kanji looks like, but also what it means and what it sounds like.
Here’s an example of a mnemonic sentence for a kanji in K-FRU:
A monster’s Mouth munches on the Legs of the FOUR guys who were with SHEILA.
From this sentence, you would know that the kanji 四 means “four” in English, that it is made up of two parts; “mouth” and “legs”, and that its on-yomi (Chinese sound reading) is シ. In other words, you would know how to write the kanji, what it means in English, and what is sounds like. All of this in one sentence!
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Advantages of the K-FRU system for studying Japanese kanji:
- Every single kanji has its own sentence which is unique and easy to remember!
- Sentences are laid out so that you know exactly how a kanji is written.
- Unlike some kanji textbooks, in the K-FRU system, beginning level students learn beginning level kanji which they will encounter in their classrooms, their course work, or their entrance into basic Japanese life, not advance level kanji which they do not yet need.