P4 Chinese: every character, lesson by lesson

P4 Chinese is 16 lessons in two books, 4A and 4B. P4 classes still use the old 欢乐伙伴 books (the 2024 syllabus reaches P4 in 2027). This year your child learns to read 307 new characters and to write 161 of them. Higher Chinese writes 260.

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. Under the tables, tap a lesson to see the deck's cards for it.

The free sample is lessons 1 to 3 of the P4 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.

P4 is the last year Standard and Higher Chinese share a book. From P5, Higher Chinese has lessons of its own and MOE's syllabus adds Foundation Chinese, so the P4 year is what your child carries into that split.

It's also a heavy reading year: 307 new characters to read, more than in P3. If your child passes Friday's 听写 and has forgotten the list two weeks later, P4 is where that starts to show in comprehension.

I'm Joshua. We speak English at home, and Chinese was a struggle for my daughter from P1. Below is every P4 lesson's characters from MOE's own list, so you know what this year asks. The free sample is lessons 1 to 3 of the deck I built to make them stick.

A P4 lesson brings about 19 new characters to read and 10 to write. Friday's 听写 tests them once, and without review, words learnt for Friday fade fast. By P4 that's four years of lists, and the old ones are the ones your child meets in a passage.

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.

Drilling for Friday puts the words in short-term memory, and a week later the brain has let most of them go. In P4 it adds up: a child who can't read last term's words reads a passage word by word, decoding instead of reading.

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 P4 deck works the same way: the algorithm decides what to review and when, so you don't have to.