Another common compound stroke that uses zhé is the shù zhé stroke. As with héng zhé, the zhé portion of this stroke indicates a bend from the direction in which you're already drawing. Thus, shù zhé begins as a vertical shù stroke and takes a 90-degree zhé turn to the right:

Adding shù zhé to your repertoire of strokes, as well as varying the lengths of each stroke, allows you to write a few more common Chinese characters. Notice how this first example somewhat resembles what it's depicting:

The next character is something of a variation on the previous one, though its meaning is less obvious by just looking at it:

Later in this book, I show you how to combine the zhé stroke in more complicated ways to draw a variety of strokes.

For now, though, using only the héng stroke, the shù stroke, and two variations using zhé strokes, you've learned to write 26 hànzi characters. Most of these are common, useful words that you'll use every day when speaking and writing Chinese.

In the next chapter, I show you how to draw three more basic strokes that will allow you to write dozens of new Chinese characters.