Charmander

Charmander has a surprisingly similar breakdown in both English and Japanese.

The English is made up of char and mander.

Char is a word meaning to burn or reduce to charcoal.

Mander on the other hand comes from salamander which is both a real world animal and one of legend. The real world salamander is any tailed amphibian of the order Caudata, having a soft, moist, scaleless skin, typically aquatic as a larva and semiterrestrial as an adult. Alternatively, a salamander is a mythical being, especially a lizard or other reptile, thought to be able to live in fire. That last one sounds more like our fiery Charmander.

In Japanese, Charmander is written in Katakana and is ヒトカゲ (hitokage). We can translate this to Hiragana as ひとかげ.

ひ (hi) is Japanese for fire. とかげ (tokage) is Japanese for lizard. Combine these and we have a perfect description of the fiery starter.

I have seen a reference to the full Pokémon name ひとかげ (but using the Kanji 火蜥蜴) translating to salamander. But the more common translation of salamander appears to be to use kana サンショウウオ (Sanshō̄o).