Here’s a combined stroke made up of only two basic strokes – a leftward piě stroke followed by a sharp zhé turn to the right:

Notice that the piě stroke here is more or less straight, in contrast to its normally curved shape in both the piě and shù piě strokes.

Here’s a common character that includes piě zhé. It rarely appears in Chinese text by itself, but it’s part of a variety of common Chinese question words, such as the words for how, what, and when:

Before moving on, notice that in this character, piě zhé is followed immediately by a diǎn stroke. This combination is a common radical in Chinese, which we’ll look at more closely in Part 3.

Adding a nà stroke to the character above creates another character that stands on its own as a word, but also occurs commonly as part of a variety of Chinese words with multiple characters:

Here’s a very common character that combines two components you already know: the character 土 (which means “earth,” pronounced tǔ in Mandarin) on top with the piě zhé + diǎn combination on the bottom:

Here’s another common character that includes the piě zhé + diǎn combination:

Finally, this character is a bit more complex, but still well within your grasp:

Notice that, like 去, this character also includes the 土 component and the piě zhé + diǎn combination, but with the order switched around. Note also that this is a relatively rare case of a Chinese character with a left-right split in which the left side is wider than the right.