As you can see, the héng zhé gōu stroke is composed of three basic strokes: the héng zhé stroke that you already know and love with a gōu hook added at the end.

Here's a character that appears in a variety of common Chinese words:

Notice the stroke order in this character is a little counterintuitive: the héng zhé gōu stroke is first, followed by shù piě. However, in the next character, this stroke order is reversed:

Here's a simple and useful character that also includes a héng zhé gōu stroke:

Here's another character that's equally simple and useful:

Adding a familiar piě + shù combination to the results in one of the most frequently used characters in Chinese:

Before moving on, note that 们 is pronounced men in Mandarin – that is, with a neutral tone – because it's rarely used on its own: rather, it attaches to the end of other words to make them plural. For example, it combines with 你 (pronounced nǐ in Mandarin) to create the Chinese word 你们 (pronounced nǐmen in Mandarin), signifying the plural version of "you" that's absent – sometimes inconveniently so – from contemporary standard English.

This next character combines 门 (door) and 口 (mouth) to create a new word:

Notice that the stroke order requires you to complete all three strokes from 门, and only then proceed to the three from口.

Here’s a very common Chinese character:

Here's another character you'll use frequently when writing Chinese, especially when writing dates:

As a quick aside here, the shù piě stroke here is probably a remnant of an ancient form of this character that more closely resembled a crescent moon.

And here's a character for a common object you're using right now:

Be especially sure to follow the stroke order in this case, because I think it makes the character a lot simpler to draw correctly.

The next character provides an example of a slight variation on the shù wān gōu stroke. Here, notice that the initial shù stroke is drawn diagonally upward:

This character can be found as a component in a variety of other common Chinese characters. For example:

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't show you the most commonly used character in written Chinese:

Although this character includes 8 strokes, the first five are simply a compact version of the character 白 (white – pronounced bái in Mandarin), which you already know how to write: diǎn + shù + héng zhé + héng + héng. As usual with characters that split vertically, the right side is of this character is noticeably wider than the left.