# The 92 Chinese Words Tested Every Year in Top-School P6 Prelims > We counted every vocabulary item in 266 top-school P6 Chinese prelim papers, 2021–2025. These 92 words appeared in all five years. Top 30, with pinyin and meanings. 更新 / Updated: 2026-09-04 ## 要点 / Key points - 92 words appeared in every year from 2021 to 2025 across 266 top-school P6 Chinese prelim papers. - The top 30 are dominated by words about effort and difficulty: 困难, 功课, 成绩, 努力. - Test before teaching: most P6 children already know half the list, and the misses are where the work is. Most Chinese word lists your child brings home are someone's opinion. This one is a count. We processed 266 different Primary 6 Chinese prelim papers (duplicates removed) 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. | Word | Pinyin | Meaning | Times | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | 困难 | kùn nán | difficulty; hard | 44 | | 功课 | gōng kè | homework | 41 | | 成绩 | chéng jì | results; grades | 37 | | 努力 | nǔ lì | to work hard | 35 | | 拖延 | tuō yán | to delay; to procrastinate | 35 | | 慈祥 | cí xiáng | kindly (of an elder) | 31 | | 模仿 | mó fǎng | to imitate | 31 | | 严格 | yán gé | strict | 29 | | 担心 | dān xīn | to worry | 29 | | 坚强 | jiān qiáng | strong; resolute | 28 | | 帮助 | bāng zhù | to help | 28 | | 抱怨 | bào yuàn | to complain | 28 | | 打扰 | dǎ rǎo | to disturb | 27 | | 比赛 | bǐ sài | competition | 27 | | 照顾 | zhào gù | to take care of | 27 | | 吩咐 | fēn fù | to instruct; to tell | 26 | | 促进 | cù jìn | to promote | 25 | | 回忆 | huí yì | to recall; memory | 25 | | 坚持 | jiān chí | to keep going; to persist | 24 | | 普通 | pǔ tōng | ordinary | 24 | | 吸引 | xī yǐn | to attract | 23 | | 贡献 | gòng xiàn | to contribute | 23 | | 修理 | xiū lǐ | to repair | 22 | | 争夺 | zhēng duó | to fight over; to compete for | 21 | | 增添 | zēng tiān | to add to; to increase | 21 | | 勤奋 | qín fèn | hardworking | 20 | | 佩服 | pèi fú | to admire | 19 | | 怀疑 | huái yí | to doubt; to suspect | 19 | | 批评 | pī píng | to criticise | 19 | | 闷闷不乐 | mèn mèn bù lè | gloomy; in low spirits (idiom) | 19 | *Source: 266 different P6 prelim papers from Singapore top primary schools, 2021–2025. 「Times」 = total appearances across the seven language-use question types we track (each type's top-80 list). 「Every year」 = appeared in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 in at least one of those types. Pinyin and meanings come from the MOE textbook character lists where available.* ## 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 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 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. [Try P6 practice — free →](https://acelah.com/explore/6) — Every word on this list has practice questions on AceLah, aligned to the MOE syllabus for P1 to P6 and marked as your child goes. The ones they miss come back later as new questions until they stick. --- 来源 / Source: https://acelah.com/guide/psle-chinese-words-every-year-prelim 引用规则 / Citation policy: https://acelah.com/cite AceLah 与新加坡教育部(MOE)、考评局(SEAB)无隶属关系,也未获其认可。AceLah is not affiliated with or endorsed by MOE or SEAB.