火
A lot of other words contain this kanji, so let's go over some.
火災・火山・噴火・火星・防火・火薬
かさい・かざん・ふんか・かせい・ぼうか・かやく
Also means fire, but in the context of a conflagration, an uncontrolled, fire that destroys people's shit.
Take a wild guess. It's written with the characters for Fire and Mountain. That's right, volcano.
Where as 火山 is a volcano, 噴火 is an eruption.
The characters for Fire and World. Mars.
Fire prevention, fire fighting, or fire resistant.
Fire and Efficacious Chemical characters. Gunpowder.
Now we're going to look at some words that also contain the fire character, but not in the same way that the above kanji do. This takes us off into the next part of this lesson and a vital part of learning the structure of kanji.
灰・秋・談・煉瓦・焼
はい・あき・ダン・れんが・や
Contained fire character. Means ashes.
Fire radical and two-branch tree radical. Means Fall or Autumn
A talk, a conversation.
A brick. Bricks. However, this is usually written in kana alone instead of kanji. Still, this plays into what I'm trying to teach you here.
To burn, bake, or cook something. Usually used in a culinary context, hence why the kanji is used in words like すき焼き.
The first set and this set of kanji are similar, but also wildly different. While the first set uses the fire character as the first part, or the first kanji of the two, the second set uses the fire character as a part of a single kanji. We call those parts radicals. There are hundreds of radicals out there, and knowing the radicals of a particular kanji can sometimes allow you to immediately guess if it's related to something like fish, insects, water, electricity, vocal expression, light, blood, and things like that.
油・洗・清
あぶら・あらう・きよ
Oil. Used in words such as 油絵(あぶらえ)Oil Painting and 原油(げんゆ)Crude Oil
To wash, or to inquire. Used in words such as 洗濯(せんたく)Laundry.
To cleanse, to purify, pure. Used in words such as 清々しい and 清潔(せいけつ). The 々 character in 清々しい is used when the same kanji is being used twice. This character is written in place of the kanji so you don't have to write it twice, while still indicating that the same phonetic sound is repeated twice. So, in 清々しい, 清 is being read as すか. You'd read 清々しい asすかすかしい
All of the above kanji have those small, three strokes to the left in common. That is another one of those kanji parts, a radical. This particular radical is the water radical. You'll see that radical in kanji that have anything to do with cleaning, washing, water, liquids, and things of that nature. The structure of those kanji will begin to follow a logical sequence as you learn more radicals.
Now sometimes kanji will have certain radicals just for the fuck of it. For fuck's sake, the kanji for snail contains the kanji for cow for some unexplained reason, but asking why this is the case is like asking why we use R in the word Wrapper when R is also in the word Truck.
The thing is, even if the radical doesn't give you an accurate representation of the kanji's probable meaning at a glance before you even look it up, it still puts you a step closer and being able to write it. For instance, if you know how to write the kanji for person, three, and sun, you're going to have an easy time writing the kanji spring, 春, because those parts are what make up the kanji. If you know how to write the kanji for temple and sun, you're going to have an easy time writing the kanji for time 時.
Here's a list of over 200 kanji radicals and their meanings
kanjialive.com/214-traditional-kanji-radicals/
Of course, you don't have to go through all of them, it's not necessary. Only common ones like Insect, Light/Hair, Fire, Water, Rain, Child, and Stretch for instance. Learning radicals will make writing kanji a fucking breeze, and may even help you decipher a kanji's subject matter before you know what it is.
God help your faggot soul if you can't learn at least that much. You'll never score any manko, you fucking loser. You'll never get any of that SKEET SKEET, you know what I mean? And lemme tell ya, Jap girls love using their tongues to gently caress the naught bits, and they produce a good amount of saliva for when it's time to slobber on some ちんちん.
Even their mankos taste like radiation poisoning, you know what I mean?
