P5 Chinese: every character, lesson by lesson

P5 is where Standard and Higher Chinese part ways. Standard Chinese is 15 lessons in two books, 5A and 5B: 267 new characters to read and 202 to write. Higher Chinese has its own 17 lessons: 346 to read and 286 to write. P5 classes still use the old 欢乐伙伴 books (the 2024 syllabus reaches P5 in 2028).

Every lesson's characters are below, for both tracks, the way MOE lists them: the ones to read (识读字) and the ones to write (识写字). Plain characters, nothing added. Under the tables, tap a lesson to see the deck's cards for it.

The free sample is lessons 1 to 3 of the P5 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.

P5 is when Chinese starts to count. School exam results now come in Achievement Levels, like the PSLE, and the gaps from P1 to P4 show up in the marks: a passage full of words your child half-remembers is a slow, anxious read.

Each P5 lesson also asks more: about 18 new characters to read and 13 to write in Standard Chinese, and more again in Higher.

I'm Joshua. We speak English at home, and Chinese was a struggle for my daughter from P1. Below is every P5 lesson's characters from MOE's own list, Standard and Higher, 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.

Friday's 听写 tests each lesson's words once, and without review, words learnt for Friday fade fast. In P5 that matters more than before, because comprehension passages use everything from P1 onwards, not only this week's list.

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, for Standard and Higher Chinese, 10-15 minutes a day. Anki decides what to review and when; your child taps a button to rate how well they remembered.

Most of us answer a slipping P5 grade with more: more tuition, more worksheets, more drilling before tests. But drilling puts words in short-term memory, and a week later the brain has let most of them go. More of it is a faster treadmill.

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 P5 deck works the same way: the algorithm decides what to review and when, so you don't have to.