Have arrived in Japan and have been able to use my Japanese relatively successfully so far. One mistake I realized, I wanted to say ‘fee’ after making a toll call from the hotel phone, and immediately went for ひ (費). The staff looked quite confused, asking どんなヒ？. Realized I should have used りょうきん/りょう (料金/料). Would anyone understand 費 in such a context or is it definitely confusing?
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I’ve only seen it in the context of しょうひ【消費】- consumption so far, so from that standpoint it would be confusing to me.
This belongs on the daily thread if you ask me, but anyways.
Word of advice: make the distinction between a word and a kanji. 費 is just a kanji and a suffix, but not a word by itself.
Also, you provided little to no context as to what you tried to describe by “fee”. What few? The price of the toll call? The price of whatever you inquired via toll call? etc.etc.
費 by itself would not mean anything to me- in the specific instance you provided the most appropriate word would be 料金 or 通話料. I would personally say「通話料かかりますか？」
費 to mean something like what you used it for would have to be compounded, most often with 費用 (expenses) or something specific like 旅費 (travel expenses) 食費 (dining expenses) etc.
This right here is why you can get into a great deal of trouble if you treat kanji as words.
This is why people here keep saying „don’t learn kanji, learn vocabulary“. On‘yomi alone often don’t mean anything.