meritorious deed or service / achievement / result / service / accomplishment / work (physics)

= + : Gitta Giraffe practices her Kung Fu skills in front of the engine with a sparring robot made out of steel beams. The robot is programmed to fight Kung Fu, but Gitta Giraffe's Kung Fu is better: she hits the robots power button and turns it off.

功 character breakdown

surname Li
power / force / strength / ability / strenuously

= + 丿 : Mnemonic symbol: a power button.

Li Qingzhao (li) just had a shower in the space station's bathroom (Ø4) and wants to use the hair dryer, but there's no plug, just the bare end of the cable! She uses all her power to build an electricity plug, and for the two pins she uses a plough (㇆) and a banana (丿). Finally she hits a big power button (力) to turn the power on.
work / worker / skill / profession / trade / craft / labor

= + : Mnemonic symbol: a steel beam, since 工 looks like the cross section of a steel beam. In front of the engine ((e)ng1), Gitta Giraffe (gu) is doing some hard work: She's stacking a capacitor (二) on a dinosaur bone (丨) on a capacitor (二). She's not very successful, but then she gets the idea to use steel beams (工) as support.

Characters with 功 as component

功 is not used as a component in another character.

Words with 功

to waste all one's previous efforts (idiom) / all that has been achieved goes down the drain
see 下工夫[xia4 gong1 fu5]
one's contributions cannot go unnoticed (idiom)
half the work, twice the effect (idiom); the right approach saves effort and leads to better results / a stitch in time saves nine
to act (in opera) / stage business
success at one go / to succeed at the first attempt
to practice (work skills)
lit. not aiming to achieve the best possible result, but rather trying to avoid making mistakes (idiom) / fig. to take a risk-averse approach
twice the effort for half the result

Sentences with 功

nín
de
go̅ng
láo
kě
bù
xiǎo
a