Unlike héng, shù isn't a character in Chinese because it doesn't have a meaning on its own in modern Chinese writing. But it appears in many characters when combined with other strokes. For example, here's a common character that you can write using only shù and héng strokes：

In this character, the stroke order may be different from the one you use when making a plus sign in English: The horizontal héng stroke comes first, followed by the vertical shù stroke. Although ignoring this stroke order may not make much of a difference in this character, it could affect your writing later on as the characters become increasingly complex.

Here's another common Chinese character that uses only héng and shù strokes:

And here's yet another: In this character, the lengths of the two héng strokes are varied.

In this character, the top héng stroke is slightly shorter than the one below it:

Notice that this character has two significantly different meanings, in each case paired with a different tone when spoken in Mandarin.

As you may have guessed, the length of a stroke in each character is important. In some cases, varying the length of a single stroke will change the meaning of that character. Here's a good example using two common characters:

In the character tǔ, meaning "earth," the bottom héng stroke is longer than the top one. In contrast, in the character shì, meaning "knight," the bottom héng stroke is shorter than the top one.

Here's another character with varied stroke lengths. This time, the top and bottom héng strokes are both the same length, and a little bit longer than the middle stroke:

And as another example, the following character includes two shù and two héng strokes, in each case of varying lengths. Begin with the longest shù, then attach the short héng to it, and finally complete the remaining strokes:

When writing the next character, begin with a héng stroke on top and then copy the strokes in the same order from the previous character:

Here's an example of a simple character where, in my humble opinion, stroke order matters because it helps to provide structural balance to the resulting character. This character is one of two common ways to say "sweet" in Mandarin (the other way is 甜, pronounced tián):

Before moving on, notice that甘and干are both pronounced gān in Mandarin. These two words are homophones – that is, they have the same pronunciation and the same tone. Thus, you'll use context to distinguish them when speaking Mandarin, just as you distinguish homophones such as to, too, and two in English.

To finish up, here's one final character that you can write using only héng and shù strokes.

As you can imagine, every new stroke that you add to your repertoire will greatly extend your ability to write Chinese characters.