You can remember the meaning of 开火 with this easy mnemonic:
Once you see the birds, just open (开) fire (火)!
Using mnemonics to remember the meaning of Chinese characters like can have an enormous impact on how long to learn Mandarin it takes.
Build your Mandarin vocabulary with Pandanese — a website that integrates spaced repetition, mnemonics, and gamification to teach you over 6,000 Chinese characters with their hanzi and pinyin in as little as one year.
Start now for free!