The next stroke, nà, which means "press down" or just "press," is a stroke that curves to the left a bit more forcefully than piě curves to the right:

As you can see, the nà stroke curves gently downward. Note also that in contrast to the pie stroke, which thins to a point, the signature feature of the nà stroke is that it thickens in width. This feature makes sense when you consider that in calligraphy, the effect of "pressing down" on the brush is to add thickness to the stroke at the end.

In practice, the nà stroke is often used in conjunction with shù piě, because these two strokes balance each other out nicely. For example, one of the most commonly used nouns in Chinese consists solely of a shù piě stroke and a nà stroke:

Before moving on, notice how this character resembles a simplified version of a standing person. In this next character, with the addition of a héng stroke, this person is now holding their arms out as wide as possible, signifying a meaning that may seem obvious:

Adding a diǎn stroke changes the meaning again:

And when you adjust the position of this diǎn stroke, you get another character that is one of two common words for a popular pet (the other – 狗, pronounced gou in Mandarin – is used more frequently in modern Chinese in less formal settings):

Here's another common Chinese word that incorporates shù piě and nà strokes:

And here's the character for another number, which you can of course use in combination with the numbers you've already learned how to write:

This character looks somewhat like what it means:

A slight change to the previous character gives you a new character:

This word isn't so common, but you'll find as part of a variety of common Chinese characters:

Here’s a slightly more complicated character that is use very frequently in both spoken and written Chinese:

And here's another common character that uses the shùpiě stroke as well as the nà stroke:

Here’s a character that has no equivalent meaning in English, but is also among the most commonly used Chinese characters:

This “counter” word needs to be included in a variety of situations involving nouns in Mandarin. I'll explain how to use this ubiquitous character later in this book, as you start to write Chinese sentences.

To finish up, this complicated looking character is among the most ubiquitous in Chinese:

Notice that the first four strokes are a vertically compact form of the character 日 (pronounced ri in Mandarin), which you already know: shù + héng zhé + héng + héng.