The 92 Chinese Words Tested Every Year in P6

Most Chinese word lists your child brings home are someone's opinion. This one is a count. We processed five years (2021 to 2025) of Primary 6 Chinese exam-point data and tallied how often each vocabulary item was actually tested.

Ninety-two words turned up in all five years. Not one year, not three — every single year, across five different cohorts of paper setters. If your child is going to memorise anything, start here.

What this data is, precisely: our own count of P6 Chinese exam points across five years, 2021 to 2025. These are our own statistics, not data published by SEAB, and no exam text is reproduced here — only word lists and counts.

Why counting across years is worth it

Parents in Singapore already buy stacks of practice papers, and for good reason: the teachers who set them teach the same syllabus, watch the same cohort, and aim at the same exam. What no one usually does is count across years. A single year of data only shows that year's preference. Five years of exam-point data show what keeps coming back.

The pattern that emerges is narrower than most parents expect. Across all question types we tracked, a small core of words does an outsized amount of the work.

The top 30 words that appeared every year, 2021–2025

Ranked by total appearances across all five years. Every word below was tested in each of the five years.

Three things this list quietly tells you

1. The vocabulary is about character, not scenery

Look at what dominates: 困难 (difficulty), 抱怨 (to complain), 努力 (to work hard), 拖延 (to procrastinate), 勤奋 (hardworking), 坚强 (resolute), 坚持 (to keep going). These are not words for describing a beach or a market. They are the words you need to write and read about someone facing a problem and dealing with it.

That is the shape of the composition and comprehension passages too. A child who owns these thirty words can follow almost any P6 narrative, because almost every P6 narrative is about a child who struggles, complains, tries again and learns something.

2. Idioms cluster around the same few

One idiom made the top thirty on total count alone: 闷闷不乐 (gloomy). The other idioms in the full every-year list are the same kind — narrative idioms that describe a moment in a story rather than an abstract idea. Paper setters reach for them because they fit the kind of passage they are already writing.

3. One connective is doing heavy lifting

尽管 (even though) appears 17 times across five years, more than any other connective in our count. It is also one that children get wrong constantly, because it pairs differently from 虽然. We look at connectives properly in a separate piece.

How to use a list like this without wasting the week

A frequency list is a starting order, not a syllabus. Two ways to use it badly: printing it and asking your child to memorise thirty words tonight, or treating anything not on it as safe. Neither works.

1. Test first, then study. Read the thirty words aloud and ask your child for the meaning. Most children already know fifteen to twenty. Studying those again is wasted time — circle only the ones that came back blank.
2. Work on the blanks in small batches, five at a time, not thirty. Overloading a session is the single most common reason a word does not stick.
3. Revisit each blank on day 3, day 7 and day 21. Recall beats rereading by a wide margin, and spacing beats cramming. These are two of the best-supported findings in memory research, and they are free to apply.
4. Use each word in one sentence your child writes themselves. A word that has never left the vocabulary list will not turn up in a composition when it is needed.

The full every-year list runs to 92 words — every word that appeared in all five years in at least one question type; the 30 above are the most frequent across all types. The remaining 62 follow the same pattern and are worth a second pass once these are secure.