Hello, sorry if this has been asked before. While learning Kanji, our teacher sometimes makes a mention of some part of the kanji that is related to a certain meaning, and when looking stuff up online I’ve often seen people describe parts of the kanji as “associated with X or Y”, either phonetically or referring to their meaning. For example, I saw a post where someone was saying that the roof radical appears as the “kan” phonetic component. Knowing things like this would be immensely useful and interesting to me while learning kanji, so I was wondering if there are any resources I could look at that would explain things such as this, or provide context as for the meaning of certain radicals, their purpose in certain parts of the kanji and so on. Thank you in advance!
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You can look up the characters on [Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/), and go to Chinese > Glyph origin. [Example with 晴:](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%99%B4#Glyph_origin)
> Phono-semantic compound (形聲, OC *zleŋ): semantic 日 (“sun”) + phonetic 青 (OC *sʰleːŋ).
This tells you that 日 is the semantic component (sun -> sunny) and that 青 is the phonetic component (*sʰleːŋ -> *zleŋ in **O**ld **C**hinese, notice that they were similar enough that now in Japanese they’re both せい).
> I saw a post where someone was saying that the roof radical appears as the “kan” phonetic component.
Where did you see this? Assuming you mean 宀, I don’t think that’s right..
What you are looking for is Kanji etymology resources. You can use http://zhongwen.com/index.html and draw the required parallels that apply to the japanese language. You can also check Henshall’s “A guide to remembering the Japanese Characters”, which is maybe the most prominent resource in Kanji etymology among learners, for all the Jouyou Kanji.