The 92 Chinese Words That Appeared Every Single Year in Top-School Prelims

Most Chinese word lists your child brings home are someone's opinion. This one is a count. We processed 266 deduplicated Primary 6 Chinese prelim papers from Singapore's top primary schools, covering 2021 to 2025, 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: 266 P6 prelim papers set by top primary schools between 2021 and 2025. These are the mock papers schools write in-house before the national exam. They are not SEAB's actual PSLE papers, and no exam text is reproduced here — only word lists and counts.

Why prelim papers are worth counting

Parents in Singapore already buy stacks of prelim 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 all of them at once. A single paper tells you what one school thought was important in one year. Two hundred and sixty-six papers tell you what the whole group keeps coming back to.

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 266 papers. 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), 珍惜 (to cherish). 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 prelim narrative, because almost every prelim narrative is about a child who struggles, complains, tries again and learns something.

2. Idioms cluster around the same few

Two idioms made the every-year list on total count alone: 恍然大悟 (to suddenly realise) and 津津有味 (with great relish). Both are narrative idioms — they 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. This is the most replicated pair of findings in the memory literature, and it is 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; the 30 above are the most frequent. The remaining 62 follow the same pattern and are worth a second pass once these are secure.