I think that’s going a bit too far. Those aren’t the actual component of the character and breaking everything down into the smallest possible (visual) components will create too few components, leading to too many combinations. Fire is common enough that you should learn it as one unit, especially since it kind of looks like a flame still and is quite easy to remember!

I suppose that the easiest and a very simple way to learn and memorize Chinese characters is to learn Chinese radicals and Chinese character decomposition!

Decomposition of the Chinese character 火 huǒ ‘fire’:

丷 bā eight
人 rén man

火 huǒ fire
丷人

Yes, as you guessed 心 and 忄 are treated differently in the cjk data and hence not found. I also find 忘 and忙 particularly difficult.

Good catch! Sometimes the most obvious things are the easiest to miss. 🙂

Yeah, they share the same phonetic component. That’s not true for most of the characters in this article though, but it does make it a tricky case. Those characters probably make up the most common pair in this category, too.

That certainly works for reading, but not for writing! You can add/remove/change quite a lot in Chinese characters before they become completely unreadable, especially if you have some context (don’t have a good article to link to, but I saw one a while ago where someone had added random elements to characters and most native speakers didn’t even notice when read quickly). Writing is of course a different matter.

Thank you so much for doing the search. I have added and annotated these examples to the list in the article. There will be more, because I don’t think your search includes variant forms of some components. For example, Els suggested 忘 versus 忙 in a comment, which is neither on my nor your list. Perhaps 心 and 忄 are treated differently in your breakdown? This is not terribly important, expanding the list this much is great! 🙂

I didn’t add 垅 and 垄 since they seem to be mostly variants of each other in modern Chinese at least.