P1 Chinese: every character, lesson by lesson

P1 Chinese is 19 lessons in two books, 1A and 1B. On the 2024 syllabus (the 欢乐伙伴2.0 books P1 classes have used since 2024), your child learns to read 364 characters this year and to write 167 of them. Higher Chinese writes 202.

Every lesson's characters are below, the way MOE lists them: the ones to read (识读字) and the ones to write (识写字). Plain characters, nothing added, so you can check this week's lesson on your phone.

If you want your child to keep them past Friday's 听写, the free sample is lessons 1 to 3 of the P1 deck as Anki flashcards. Every card has natural Mandarin audio, pinyin and English, so you can follow along even if you don't read Chinese.

Your child brings home the 听写 list on Monday, passes on Friday, and two weeks later has forgotten almost everything. And if you don't read Chinese, you can't even check the list.

You're in good company. In the 2020 Census, about 3 in 4 Chinese children aged 5 to 14 in Singapore spoke English most often at home. For most P1 kids, Chinese is a school subject closer to a foreign language.

I'm Joshua. We speak English at home too, and P1 Chinese was a struggle for my daughter. Below is every P1 lesson's characters from MOE's own list, so you know exactly what's coming. The free sample is lessons 1 to 3 of the deck I built to make them stick.

A P1 lesson brings about 20 new characters to read. Friday's 听写 tests them once, and without review, words learnt for Friday fade fast.

Spaced repetition fixes the timing: each word comes back right before your child would forget it. In 1885 the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus found that 38 repetitions spread over three days worked as well as 68 crammed into one day.

That's what the deck does with the lists above, lesson by lesson: roughly 4 new cards per school weekday, 10-15 minutes a day. Anki decides what to review and when; your child taps a button to rate how well they remembered.

The list is the easy part. Drilling for Friday puts the words in short-term memory, and a week later the brain has let most of them go. More drilling runs the same cycle faster.

What works is timing. Spaced repetition shows each word right before your child would forget it, so every successful recall pushes the next review further out. Ebbinghaus measured it in 1885: 38 repetitions spread over three days worked as well as 68 crammed into one day.

Within 4 months, my daughter could read and recognise every P1 word. 10-15 minutes a day, no tuition, and the algorithm decided what to review and when.