Thanks, Isabelle, for those examples of "而' and “并“ — sadly, I’m not yet close to confident in using those two. Usually, characters like 又 and 也 come to mind, but I’m probably wrong as often as not.

I think the problem with 和 is that learners often think it means “and”. It doesn’t. A better translation might be “with” or, since Chinese prepositions are really verbs, “to be together”.

In your examples, it appears you’ve used the character a little differently each time. Here’s my interpretation; let me know if it’s close:

"他和我都想去。” He and I both want to go. (Literally, “He with me”)

"他和我说他想去。” He tells me he wants to go. (More literally, “He spoke with me that….)

”他要和我一起去。” He wants to go (together) with me.

Interestingly, I ran those three sentences through Google Translate, and the machine appears to have given pretty good translations in idiomatic English (at any rate, it agrees with me). This is surprising, since Chinese-English is often a challenge for machine translation, including the almighty Google:

<em>"He and I want to go."</em>

<em>"He told me he wanted to go."</em>

<em>"He wants to go with me."</em>

Isabelle, it would seem you actually know something about teaching Chinese to foreigners.