There are a few cases where I would have trouble with some kanji, until I would notice (or until someone would point out to me) some regular pattern.
For example, just like with trees, all fish have 魚 on the left, and all insects have 虫 on the left too. With trees this is easily noticeable and not an issue because 木 is always on the left, but the fish and insect radicals can be in other positions, so it is harder to see.
I wonder how many other things like these are out there -- what were the things that you would notice and then would think "I really wish I knew this earlier"?

Good idea.

Also, the converse of that: how can you tell whether things are one-offs or not? For example, the diagonal part of the body that looks like a double evening in 241 sort of thing 然, or the black that can't decide whether it's on the left or bottom in 240 silence 黙.

I guess one could use an electronic dictionary in some cases. E.g. mine finds 17 characters with the "curved moon", most of them probably rare, so for the RTK purposes it can perhaps be considered "one-off". (I am using a Russian dictionary called Yarxi, but its' help file states that it has an English shareware version called JISHOP, you may check it -- the kanji lookup system there is the most powerful I've seen).
But probably the most valuable kind of insight comes later when you yourself realize the pattern you haven't seen before.

See this thread http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=174 for a discussion of some others.

I'm not sure what you guys mean by "one-off." Did this come up in a previous discussion?

I think that the reason for the strange appearance of silence is that it used to be written 默, and the "oven fire" was moved to make the character look better. A similarly interesting phenomenon happened with 點, which is the old version of 点.

Incidentally, 黙,　默, and 點 all have 黑 as their main radical, even though it's distorted in 黙. The main radical of 点 is 灬.

laxxy Wrote:With trees this is easily noticeable and not an issue because 木 is always on the left, but the fish and insect radicals can be in other positions

That's not 100% correct. Take a look at "pear tree". This is a tree, but the primitive is at the bottom, and not on the left.

Same goes for "twig" 条 and "mulberry tree" 桑

I took laxxy's meaning as 'if it's got tree on the left, then it's a tree'.

That's the opposite of what laxxy said, and anyway:

格札机朴材

Yes, there are mulberry, pear, also apricot, for some reason they did not trouble me much so I didn't think of them when I was writing this. Perhaps I can usually remember if the radicals are arranged vertically or horizontally, but often confuse left with right and up with bottom (but pretty much never left with bottom, etc.)
So I should have said 'tree is (almost?) never on the right'.


PS. 'twig' is not really a tree, and I actually think it is one of the poorly chosen keywords, as whenever I saw it so far the actual meaning always was 'paragraph'/'article', nothing to do with the twigs.

I stand corrected (on both counts)! OK laxxy's 木 hypothesis was a bit off BUT if you look at his hypothesis about 魚 and 虫 perhaps you'll see what he's talking about. Certainly from my study of fish, all fish definitely have 魚 on the left. Admittedly so does 鰐（わに） - crocodile - but 'crocodile' at least is more related to 'fish' than 'status' is to 'tree'.

I don't really want to claim that "if it has a fish on the left then it's a fish", or anything like that. My issue was much more limited -- I used to have a problem with characters like 鯨 or 蚊 or some others, and I would remember the elements, but I would put the fish or the insect on the right.