The Chinese Connectives P6 Papers Test Most

Connectives (关联词) are the most teachable marks in the paper. There are only about thirty that matter, they follow fixed pairing rules, and unlike vocabulary you cannot guess your way through them from context. A child who drills the pairings properly stops losing these marks almost overnight.

Here is which ones actually come up. We counted connectives across 266 different P6 Chinese prelim papers from Singapore's top primary schools, 2021 to 2025.

About the data: 266 P6 prelim papers set in-house by top primary schools, 2021–2025. Not SEAB's actual PSLE papers, and no exam text is reproduced — only counts.

The ranked list

尽管 is first, and that is worth pausing on

尽管 appears 17 times across all five years — ahead of 虽然 (11) and well ahead of the 因为……所以 pattern (4) that most children practise hardest. If your child's revision time is allocated by how familiar a connective feels rather than by how often it is tested, it is allocated backwards.

尽管 is also the one children get wrong most, and for a specific reason: it looks like 虽然 but does not pair like it.

The 尽管 trap

• 虽然 pairs with 但是 or 可是: 虽然下雨，但是我们还是去了。
• 尽管 also pairs with 但是, but it carries a stronger sense of 「in spite of this」, and it is often used where the second clause is a fact rather than a contrast of opinion.
• 尽管 has a second, completely different meaning that catches children out: 「by all means, go ahead」. 你尽管问。 means 「ask away」. When it appears with this sense there is no second clause to pair with at all.

Two more pairings that cost marks

不但……而且 versus 不但……反而

Both begin the same way, and both appear in the list above. 不但……而且 adds something in the same direction: not only A, but also B, and B is more of the same. 不但……反而 turns the other way: the expected thing did not happen, and the opposite happened instead. 他不但没有道歉，反而生气了。 A child who treats 反而 as a synonym for 而且 will pick the wrong option every time.

就算 and 即使

Both mean 「even if」 and both appear six times in our count. They are close enough that either is usually acceptable in speech, but 即使 is the more written, more formal of the two, and it is the one that turns up in comprehension passages. 就算 sits more naturally in dialogue. When a question gives both as options, the register of the surrounding sentence is the tiebreaker.

How to drill connectives without wasting a month

Connectives reward a different method from vocabulary. Vocabulary needs breadth; connectives need a small number of patterns done to the point of automaticity.

1. Work in pairs, not singles. Learn 虽然……但是 as one unit. A child who has only learned 虽然 alone will leave the second half of the sentence dangling.
2. Start from the top ten in the table. Those ten cover the large majority of what gets tested; the tail is worth a second pass only after the head is automatic.
3. For each pattern, write two sentences: one true about your child's own week, one deliberately wrong. Spotting why the wrong one is wrong is what the exam actually asks.
4. Revisit the ones they miss on day 3, day 7 and day 21. Connectives fade fast because they carry no picture in the mind, so spacing matters more here than almost anywhere else.

One caution about frequency lists: a connective near the bottom of this table is not safe to skip. Rarer patterns still turn up, and 关联词 questions are all-or-nothing — there is no partial credit for nearly picking the right pairing.