How to Help Your Child With Chinese (Even If You Don't Speak It)

You don't need to teach your child Chinese. Their teacher does that, lesson by lesson, from the MOE textbook.

The job at home is smaller and more useful: make sure this week's words are still there next month. That takes 10-15 minutes a day, and it works the same whether you speak Chinese or not.

Here's what to do: get this week's list, test instead of re-reading, spread the practice over the week, let a recording do the pronouncing, and keep old words coming back. The details are below.

The 听写 list comes home and you can't read it. You scan it with your phone camera, Google each word to hear it, then try to test your child on words you can't say properly yourself.

If that's your evening, you're in the majority. In the 2020 Census, about 3 in 4 Chinese children aged 5 to 14 in Singapore spoke English most often at home.

I'm Joshua, and we speak English at home too. When my daughter started Primary 1, Chinese was a struggle and homework sessions were turning into arguments. Below is the part a parent can actually do.

Try the deck free

Pick your child's level and I'll email you lessons 1 to 3 of it as an Anki deck. The full level is SGD 199, all six levels SGD 599, with a 60-day money-back guarantee. More about the deck

What's in the sample

Lessons 1 to 3 of your child's level, Standard Chinese, as an Anki deck: 2024 syllabus for P1 to P3, old syllabus for P4 to P6.
Each full level has Standard and Higher Chinese. P1 to P3 come in both the old and the 2024 syllabus.
Open it in Anki on your phone, tablet or computer. Anki is free on Android, Mac and Windows.

What school covers, and what's left for home

School introduces each lesson's words: what they mean, how they sound, how to write the ones on the writing list. Then 听写 tests them, usually once.

What school can't do is bring every word back at the right moment for your child. Words learnt for Friday fade fast without review. That gap is yours, and you don't need any Chinese to fill it.

Most of the advice you'll hear assumes someone at home speaks Chinese fluently enough to back up what school teaches. For a lot of families that assumption doesn't hold, and the guilt that follows isn't yours to carry.

The good news is that the piece school leaves to home has little to do with speaking Chinese. It's about timing: getting your child to pull each word out of memory, again and again, a little further apart each time.

Five things you can do this week

Get this week's list. The words come from MOE's syllabus, lesson by lesson. Ask for the 听写 list, or check the lesson in the textbook. The P1 post shows MOE's characters for every P1 lesson.
Test instead of re-reading. Say the word (or play it), and let your child write or read it from memory before they see the answer. In a 2006 study, students who tested themselves on a passage remembered 56% of it a week later; students who re-read it remembered 42%.
Spread it out. 10 minutes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday beats 45 minutes on Thursday night. In 1885 Hermann Ebbinghaus found that 38 repetitions spread over three days worked as well as 68 crammed into one day.
Let a recording do the pronouncing. Your accent doesn't have to be right if the audio is. Play the word, then ask your child to say it back and use it in a sentence.
Bring old words back. After 听写, put the words away for a few days, then test them again; then a week later; then three weeks later. Words that keep coming back move into long-term memory.

A 2013 review of ten common study techniques rated two as most useful: testing yourself and spacing practice out. Re-reading and highlighting were rated low. Everything above is those two ideas, applied to a 听写 list.

When you can't read the list

You can still check the work. Checking a 听写 is matching shapes: lay your child's page next to the list and compare stroke by stroke. Circle anything that differs, and only practise the circled words tomorrow.

For meaning and sound, pinyin and an English gloss next to each word are enough to follow along. You're the one keeping time, so the knowledge can live somewhere else.

This is where most English-speaking parents give up: you can't tell if the word is right, so you can't test it. You can, though. A 听写 check is comparing shapes, line by line, against the list. Circle what differs and practise only those tomorrow.

What you need beside each word is its pinyin, its English and a recording. With those three, you can run the whole session without speaking a word of Chinese yourself.

Where the deck fits

Doing all of this by hand for every word, every week, for six years, is the hard part. That's why I built the MOE Chinese Anki Deck.

Every word in the MOE syllabus, P1 to P6, lesson by lesson, Standard and Higher Chinese, old and 2024 syllabus: 13,453 flashcards in all.
Each card asks first, then shows the answer, and Anki brings each word back just before it would be forgotten. 10-15 minutes a day.
Natural Mandarin audio, pinyin and English on every card, so you can follow along even if you don't read Chinese. Writing cards show stroke order for every character your child must write.
Within 4 months, my daughter could read and recognise every P1 word.
The free sample is lessons 1 to 3 of your child's level, Standard Chinese. A full level is SGD 199 (all six SGD 599), with a 60-day money-back guarantee.

New to Anki? The setup pages walk you through it for iPhone, Android, Mac and Windows.

More for parents: Chinese in an English-speaking family · Child struggling with Chinese? · 听写 practice at home · How to remember Chinese characters

Sources

About 3 in 4 Chinese children aged 5 to 14 speak English most often at home: Department of Statistics Singapore, Census of Population 2020, resident population by language most frequently spoken at home, age group (Chinese): 212,325 of 274,478 children aged 5 to 14.
56% against 42% a week later: Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), Experiment 1. The students were university students reading prose.
38 repetitions over three days against 68 in one: Ebbinghaus, H. (1885). Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology, chapter 8, section 34 (English translation, 1913).
Ten techniques, two rated most useful: Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1).

Not sure yet? Start free

Tap your child's level and I'll email you lessons 1 to 3 of it as an Anki deck, free, right now.

How to help your child with Chinese, even if you don't speak it