0058 坂

坂

This character means ‘slope, hill,’ pronounced HAN or saka in Japanese, bǎn in Chinese.

The figure on the left is a vertically squeezed version of

土,

which means ‘earth, ground,’ and which gets us into the semantic territory of slopes and hills. The rest of the character is there as a hint to the pronunciation, but that won’t keep us from making a story to help us recognize it. The

⺁

portion does actually mean a cliff, which happens to be related to slopes and hills. And the

又

character, which now means ‘and, again,’ was often used in ancient times to represent a hand. So we can think of ourselves scrambling up the slope or hill under the cliff, pressing our hands out for stability.