根気
こんき · konki · JLPT N1 · noun
patience
🌳 根 (root) + 気 (spirit, energy) = staying power that keeps going
根 means root and 気 means spirit or energy. Together they describe effort that stays anchored, like a root, through long, tedious work such as drilling kanji.
根 — tree radical 木 + 艮 (phonetic)
根 is a semantic-phonetic compound. The left side 木 ('tree') gives the meaning, since the character originally referred to the roots of a tree. The right side 艮 supplies the sound. From 'tree root' it extended to mean 'root, base, foundation' in general.