P6 Chinese: every character, lesson by lesson

P6 Chinese is the shortest year: Standard Chinese is 10 lessons in two books, 6A and 6B, with 169 new characters to read and 138 to write. Higher Chinese has its own 12 lessons: 250 to read and 179 to write. P6 classes still use the old 欢乐伙伴 books (the 2024 syllabus reaches P6 in 2029).

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.

The free sample is lessons 1 to 3 of the P6 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.

The P6 lessons are the easy part. The PSLE paper doesn't ask for this year's list: its passages, its oral and its composition draw on every word from P1 to P6, and by now a lot of the early ones are gone.

Under the AL scoring system, the difference between AL1 (90+ marks) and AL2 (85-89 marks) is just 5 marks. A few half-remembered words in a comprehension passage or the oral is all it takes.

I'm Joshua. We speak English at home, and Chinese was a struggle for my daughter from P1. Below is every P6 lesson's characters from MOE's own list, Standard and Higher, so you know what's left to learn. The free sample is lessons 1 to 3 of the deck I built to make the words stick.

The P6 lists are short, but the PSLE draws on all six years. Without review, words learnt for a Friday 听写 fade fast, and a P6 child has six years of Fridays behind them.

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. The P6 deck has this year's words; the Bundle has every level from P1, so the early words come back too.

The usual answer in P6 is more: intensive classes, more papers, more drilling. But drilling puts words in short-term memory, and a week later most of them are gone. It feels like work and doesn't add up.

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. In P6 the same 10-15 minutes goes on the words the PSLE will use, chosen by the algorithm, not by guesswork.