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About the author
Timothy M Franco has been living and working between Tokyo and San Francisco for the past twelve years, where he has held roles in software engineering management, technical translation, and cross-cultural communication consulting. His career in Japan began with a dual-language engineering degree from Waseda University, followed by a decade of managing bilingual engineering teams at firms ranging from early-stage startups to publicly traded technology companies.
Franco's approach to kanji instruction emerged from a practical problem: as a working professional, he had limited time to study but needed immediate functional literacy in Japanese for daily business operations. The traditional methods—classroom instruction, rote memorization of jōyō lists, and academic textbooks—failed to deliver usable results quickly. He developed the frequency-based, 10-minute methodology detailed in this book over the course of training more than two hundred non-Japanese engineers and business professionals at his own company.
His work has been featured in the Japan Times bilingual section, and he has delivered workshops on kanji acquisition strategy at the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT) annual conference and at企业内部研修 programs for multinational corporations with Japanese offices. He maintains the website KanjiAtWork.com, where he publishes monthly articles on kanji learning strategy, reviews of Japanese reading materials for professionals, and free updates to the companion Anki deck for this book.
Franco is an advocate for pragmatic, output-driven language learning that prioritizes professional communication over academic completeness. He lives in Tokyo with his wife and two children, and he still studies kanji every day.
