P3 Chinese: every character, lesson by lesson

P3 Chinese is 17 lessons in two books, 3A and 3B. This year P3 classes moved to the 2024 syllabus (the 欢乐伙伴2.0 books, in P3 from 2026): your child learns to read 285 new characters and to write 219 of them. Higher Chinese writes 269.

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. The old syllabus is there too, for anyone still working from the old books.

The free sample is lessons 1 to 3 of the P3 deck as Anki flashcards, with natural Mandarin audio, pinyin and English on every card, so you can follow along even if you don't read Chinese.

P3 is where the writing piles up. There are fewer lessons than in P2, but your child now writes 219 characters, up from 183, and Chinese gets fewer hours a week in school than it did in P1 and P2.

You're in good company if it's slipping. 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 P3 lesson's characters from MOE's own list, so you know exactly what this year asks. The free sample is lessons 1 to 3 of the deck I built to make them stick.

A P3 lesson brings about 17 new characters to read and 13 to write, more writing per lesson than in P1 or P2. 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, 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, and writes each character they must write on its Writing card.

More writing means more to forget. Drilling for Friday puts the words in short-term memory, and a week later the brain has let most of them go. In P3 the gap shows up as whole lessons your child can read but can't write.

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 P3 deck works the same way, with a Writing card, one character at a time with stroke order, for every character your child must write.