P2 Chinese: every character, lesson by lesson

P2 Chinese is 19 lessons in two books, 2A and 2B. On the 2024 syllabus (the 欢乐伙伴2.0 books P2 classes have used since 2025), your child learns to read 382 new characters this year and to write 183 of them. Higher Chinese writes 233.

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 P2 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.

P1 was 一, 人, 口. P2 brings 382 new characters to read, more than P1's 364, and the 听写 list still comes home every week. If your child got through P1 by drilling the night before, P2 is often where that stops working.

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 kids, Chinese is a school subject closer to a foreign language.

I'm Joshua. We speak English at home too, and Chinese was a struggle for my daughter from P1. Below is every P2 lesson's characters from MOE's own list, so you can see what this year asks. The free sample is lessons 1 to 3 of the P2 deck I built to make them stick.

A P2 lesson brings about 20 new characters to read, and P1's characters don't stop mattering: P2 sentences are built on them. Friday's 听写 tests the new ones 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, 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 isn't the problem. Drilling for Friday puts the words in short-term memory, and a week later most of them are gone. By the end of P2 that is two years of lists, and more drilling only 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, at 10-15 minutes a day. The P2 deck works the same way: the algorithm decides what to review and when, so you don't have to.