The basic gōu stroke can also be combined with a vertical shù stroke to form the compound stroke shù gōu – as you may expect, a vertical line completed with a small hook. 

Adding shù gōu to your repertoire allows you to write a variety of simple and very common Chinese characters.

Here's a simple character that uses shù gōu:

The next character is simple to write. Though it isn't used much on its own apart from its meaning as the surname dīng, it appears as part of a great many more complex characters:

And here's another common character:

Here's another character that's relatively easy to write:

Although this last character is not so commonly used, a character that incorporates it is one of the most ubiquitous in Chinese:

Before moving on, notice how 时 is simply two characters that you already know – 日and 寸 – combined side by side to create a single character. As with most side-by-side combined characters, the left side occupies visibly less width than the right side.

Here's a common character that includes the box that you already know so well:

And here's another common character you'll see in a variety of contexts:

Before moving on, I want to show you how far you've come in your hànzi writing. The next character is one of the most common in Chinese:

If this character seems difficult to you, look again and see that it's made up of three sets of strokes you already know: first, the familiar piě + shù combination on the left side; second, on the top right, the piě + héng gōu combination you learned earlier in this chapter; and below that, a small version of the character 小 (pronounced xǐao in Mandarin) that you learned at the beginning of this section.

Practicing this character diligently, until you know it by heart, will give you a wonderful feeling of fluency when writing in Chinese.