艰

Right 艮 - the indexing radical. 艮 in classical use means immovable, stopped, the trigram of the mountain. It supplies the immovable resistance that gives 艰 its 'hard, difficult' core: the original 堇 meant land hard to till, and the modern 艮 keeps that sense of stuck, unyielding ground.

Left 又 - a stylised right hand. In the simplified 艰, the original left side (堇 difficult-clay) was replaced by 又 as a stroke-saving substitute. It carries no etymological meaning here; it's a graphic placeholder, but visually it suggests a hand struggling against the resistance to its right.