I’m don’t know if I can explain it properly, but the critical point to always remember is that you don’t read kanji, you read Japanese. The fact that it happens to be written using kanji is ultimately arbitrary. It can be easy to forget for foreign language learners who tend to learn a lot from books and such, but the writing system is always a secondary artefact of the language – if you don’t know the word then you don’t know it and should not really expect to be able to read it without learning it first (that is what dictionaries are for).
It’s more like four + generation + ordinal number suffix – so it’s a fourth generation fire shadow, whatever that is.
As for how to know how to read words – experience, mostly. Although, sometimes you can get away with an educated guess.
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Thanks again everyone!
Yes, I tend to forget this ^^
I don’t have any problems with words in English that I don’t know. But I’m getting confused when it comes to Kanji. Well, I’m only starting to learn so I hope this will get better 
… head → desk. Yes! kage means “shadow”. Now that you said it, it is absolutely clear. I already know that word, but couldn’t connect it with the Kanji (which I didn’t know).
That makes sense. Like, he is the fourth to protect the village in the land of fire.
Wow, thanks!! I really like this community 
I did not know this. It really is the key to OP’s question. Thanks!
In case of ambiguity, someone will ask “which こう is it?” and the response would be to either give another example word that uses the same kanji (人口の口です//じんこうのこうです) or sketch the desired kanji in the air, or both. Then the conversation continues on as if nothing had happened.
It was kind of weird the first few times I ran into it, but it made sense and once I got used to it I started doing the same thing.
Another way is to use kun’yomi, which are often associated with a unique kanji. So in this case you could explain it as “口のこうです”/“くちのこうです”.
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Yep, it’s one of the ways to make ordinal numbers in Japanese. For example:
三回 – three times
三回目 – third time
Or for a more advanced example:
４４代目の大統領 – the 44th president
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I’m used to seeing 第44代大統領
Not that I’m saying your example is ungrammatical or anything.
Yeah, 第44代 is the more official/proper way of saying it. For example, wikipedia has 第44代大統領
I just wanted to highlight the pattern we are discussing.
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