The combined stroke biǎn xié gōu is flattened form of the xié gōu stroke you already know.

This stroke doesn't appear very often in Chinese. However, here's another word for something so common that I'll bet use every day:

The biǎn xié gōu stroke is most commonly used as part of the radical 心, which appears in a variety of other Chinese characters. For example:

Note that in this character, the stroke order moves essentially from left to right. The 心 cut in two with a piě stroke seems to imply that sometimes what "must" be done can be heartbreaking.

Here's another character that includes a biǎn xié gōu stroke as part of its 心 radical:

As you can see, the character 思 is actually a combination of 田 ("field," pronounced tian in Mandarin) and 心. Knowing the two original characters should help you remember both the form and the meaning of 思: a farmer whose heart is in the field will take time to think about it.

Here's another character that incorporates the 心 radical in its most common position, in the lower portion of a character:

 And here’s another common character that includes the biǎn xié gōu stroke as part of its 心 radical at the bottom:

Here's another very common Chinese character that uses the same radical in the same position:

Don't let the fact that this character has 11 strokes put you off! This is simply a combination of the two characters 你 and心 – that is, "you" spoken with "heart." Even the Mandarin pronunciation is easy to remember: nǐ + xīn = nín.

Finally, here's a 13-stroke character made up of three separate characters you already know. See if you can sort them out:

The three characters are 木 ("tree," pronounced mù in Mandarin), 目("eye," also pronounced mù in Mandarin), and of course 心. Note that when drawing the compact version of 木 in this character and others like it, the fourth stroke changes from nà to diǎn. I'm not sure how this character originated, but to me the meaning is intuitive: When you want something, the eye sees an object (such as a tree) with the heart engaged.

I hope you'll agree that while this character may not be as simple as some of the others you've learned so far, it makes a lot more sense when you break it down into its component parts. As you'll see, this strategy for understanding Chinese characters can take you a very long way toward a deep understanding of the language.