茶
ちゃ · cha · JLPT N3 · noun
tea
🍵 Cha sounds like chai, and both words come from the Chinese word for tea
English chai comes from the same Chinese word for tea, chá. You can also split the kanji: 艹 (plants) on top, 人 (person) in the middle, 木 (tree) at the bottom. That gives a person between grass and tree, picking tea leaves.
茶 — grass radical 艹 + 余 (phonetic)
茶 combines the grass radical 艹, indicating a plant, with 余 serving as the phonetic component. It originally derived from the older character 荼, which referred broadly to bitter herbs; a stroke was dropped during the Tang dynasty to distinguish the tea plant specifically. Today it means tea.