After a period of silence, actually I do have a short question please:

攵夊夂 - all those (I am somewhere in the middle of the radicals' list) - how am I supposed to differentiate them? I mean, the differences are SO subtle...

In which contexts I am expected to differentiate them - is it all the three: reading, writing, pronouncing? Read/write seems to be the hardest.

In short, any tips, please? Stories, mnemonics, anything...

Hi, I should pretty much ignore the middle one - I haven't found a need for it yet.

As for the other two, I'm not an expert but it does seem to me that 攵 generally occurs on the right-hand-side of a character, and it doesn't seem to add much to the meaning nor even to the sound.

夂, in contrast, appears at the top of characters, and vaguely denotes movement or action.

You'll need to distinguish them when you are writing, because 夂 is written with 3 strokes and 攵 is written with 4.

You also need to know about all three if you are trying to look up a word in a radical index. I've scribbled notes in mine to cross-ref the other possibilities.

Finally, have you looked up the radicals in MDBG? I find it really handy. (see http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php and click Radical/Strokes on the left-hand-side)

Rachael.

Thanks, Rachael. Never used MDBG (yet, will try now). Never used a radical index either.

I don't know how often these radicals get used on their own, but they sure show up a lot in other characters. I would be a little surprised if writing the wrong one would confuse people - it's probably a really common mistake - but I think it would look wrong to write the three-stroke one where it should have been the four-stroke one and vice versa.

Is there a small version of the four-stroke one? The only variant I've seen is 攴.

There are other annoyingly similar radicals - 牛 年 午 come to mind.

James