Example sentences
kā咖fēi啡bù不jiā加táng糖。
Coffee without sugar.
tā他wǎn晚shàng上bù不hē喝kā咖fēi啡。
He doesn't drink coffee at night.
About this word
咖啡 is a transliteration, not a compound. The syllables kā and fēi were borrowed to imitate the sound of "coffee", and the characters were picked for their pronunciation, which is why both of them carry 口, the mouth radical. Neither character carries meaning here: 咖 turns up again in 咖喱 (curry), and 啡 is essentially reserved for this one word. Chinese keeps a small shelf of these sound loans, among them 沙发 (sofa), 巧克力 (chocolate) and 巴士 (bus). Nothing in the characters will help you guess the meaning, so learn 咖啡 as a single chunk.
The story behind the character
咖
咖 is 口 (mouth) with 加 on the right giving the sound. It is a modern character, coined to write a foreign word. 咖啡 together sounds out "coffee," and the 口 sitting on both halves is the giveaway: these are characters built to spell a sound, not to describe a thing.
啡
啡 is 口 (mouth) plus 非, which gives the sound. Like its partner 咖, it exists to spell a foreign syllable. Chinese has done this for centuries with Buddhist and imported words. 咖啡 is coffee, written out in characters that mean nothing on their own.