難 - It's DIFFICULT To Be Grilled over a Fire Like a Bird

Readings & Meanings:

かた（い）

ナン

むずか（しい）

にく（い）

difficult, disaster

Common Usage:

難しい

難解

難産

信じ難い（しんじかたい）

有り難い

分かり難い（わかりにくい）

Examples:

この物理の問題は難しい。

難解な問題を解く。

その赤ちゃんは難産の末、生まれた。

そんな話は信じ難い。

有り難く頂戴します。

彼の本心は分かり難い。

Translations:

This physics problem is hard.

I solve difficult problems.

At the end of a difficult labor, the baby was born.

That story is hard to believe.

I humbly receive (this present).

His true feelings are hard to know.

Radical:

隹 is the radical here, on the right. Its name is Furutori, because it's a pictograph of a short, plump bird without much of a tail.

On the left is the phonetic. While it doesn't stand alone any more, it used to mean grilling something over a fire, or drying out, and was included also in 漢.

So, it must be a difficult thing to be grilled over a fire like a small bird, right?

Important:

This かたい is relatively easy to discern from the other かたいs. This かたい is hard as in DIFFICULT. Also, this kanji is rarely read as "katai," but usually むずかしい or ナン (in combo with something else).

Grammar:

Usually written in hiragana, -にくい at the end of a masu-stem of a verb means "hard to (verb)." Take the masu stem (turn the verb into formal present tense: 食べるー＞食べます, and then take off the ます) and put a にくいat the end and you have a very useful construction.

難 is the origin of this construction, but it is usually used as hiragana. This is a good thing, because, as we see in 信じ難い, sometimes it's read as かたい.

References:

http://www.kanjinetworks.com/indices/radindex.html
http://www.thejapanesepage.com/node/kanji/7.htm