Does that all fit?
I am a beginner of studying Chinese so please let me ask you.
If I look up 犬 it would tell me the meaning of dog. ok so far.
in the "Appears In:"-section it would tell me the radical appears in 狄.
This I can not see directly - so I look this one up as well.
So it tells me that 犭 in the character covers the part of "dog" which doesnt look to me as the same as 犬. Am I wrong at this point?
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Marcus commented
Yeah that explains things - thank you Niel
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Hey Marcus,
you are not wrong. I'll consider adding more information, especially for beginners.
犬 means "dog", but 犭 also means "dog". They are the same character, but 犭 is the bound or radical form of the 犬.
Another example would be 水, which means "water". Its bound form is 氵 which you can see in the character 洋 (ocean) for example.
Many characters have different forms. I'll look into maybe presenting the different forms of a character. Thanks for the idea! It might take a while, because I might have to do some manual data editing for this.
I hope this clears things up?
Niel