Their Chinese, off your plate

What does my child get here?

A set of Chinese practice that follows the MOE syllabus: nearly 7,000 questions from P1 to P6, dictation cards for every lesson, and PSLE mock papers built to the real structure. Two sets a day, 5 to 15 questions each depending on grade, about ten-odd minutes a set, marked on the spot; a wrong answer comes back later asked a different way.

Your child gets a practice habit that keeps running without a parent standing over it, and a little buddy to keep them company. You get a weekly report you can actually read, and one less thing to chase every day.

Who marks the work? Who keeps track of mistakes?

The system does both. Every answer is marked on the spot, with explanations; wrong answers are recorded and come back on day 3, day 7 and day 21 as a fresh question on the same point, and only a correct answer clears it.

That rhythm is not a guess. Two of the most replicated findings in cognitive psychology sit underneath it: retrieval practice, where Roediger and Karpicke showed in 2006 that pulling an answer out of memory beats re-reading it by a wide margin, and the spacing effect, where Cepeda and colleagues pooled hundreds of studies in 2006 and found review spread over days far outperforms doing it all at once. The child just sees "that question again"; underneath, those two principles are doing the work.

What do I get to see?

Your child's practice history, mastery of every knowledge point, and a weekly report: how many sets were done, which points were cleared, which are still being missed, and where the buddy travelled this week. Weak spots are visible at a glance.

If your child has a tutor, the report can go straight to them, so nobody starts from scratch. We do not nag: parents get one email only after a full week without practice, plus the weekly report on Mondays; the rest of the time it is on the site whenever you want it.

This looks like a games site. Is my child playing or learning?

Both, and on purpose. A child who sits down on their own every day matters more than how many questions the bank holds. The games come in two kinds. Chinese games pack practice inside a game: pinyin races, word matching, dictation levels; every word a child reads, hears or spells is a textbook word, and in the same fifteen minutes they meet far more Chinese than in a worksheet, reaching for it themselves. Brain games do not test Chinese; they train attention and working memory, and cost energy that only practice earns.

This "practise inside play" approach comes from years of classroom Chinese teaching: most children who struggle with Chinese are not unable, they are unwilling to touch it. Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory explains why it works: lasting motivation grows from feeling capable, in charge, and that something is yours, and that is what the games give a child. Sailer and Homner's 2020 meta-analysis of gamified learning found the same, as long as the game mechanics genuinely serve the learning content.

Won't my child just play the games and skip the questions?

They can't. Energy for brain games and shells for the buddy are earned only by practising, never bought, and at most eight sets a day count. A set earns 2 to 5 shells by accuracy; rushing through earns 1. Sending the buddy travelling or playing a brain game means doing the questions first. The house decor works the same way: the hen lays an egg only when fed and on days with practice, the fish bowl is not for sale and arrives after a seven-day streak, and the fish grow with practice days. A broken streak drops to the last milestone rather than zero, so one missed day never wipes the slate. Games are the change left over from practice, not the main course.

The brain games are not idle time either. Schulte grids and the Flanker task are classic tools from psychology labs for assessing attention; we simply made them into something a child wants to play. Diamond's 2013 review in the Annual Review of Psychology found that executive functions such as working memory and inhibitory control predict school grades at least as well as IQ does. Many marks lost in Chinese exams come not from not knowing, but from misreading, skipping and losing the line. That part, brain games can train.

How much time does it take each day? Could my child get hooked?

A set takes ten-odd minutes, and two sets a day is enough. A set has a natural stopping point, watering takes a second, and the buddy is away for hours at a time, so there is no reason to keep staring at the screen. There is no feed, no advertising, no in-app purchases, and a push only after two days without practice, never one to pull them back late at night.

The buddy and its postcards do one thing: give a child a reason to come back tomorrow, and that reason happens to land on the same days as the day 3, 7 and 21 mistake reviews. The behaviour scientist Fogg spent decades on habits and found they rest on three things: a fixed trigger, an action small enough to always do, and a result you can see at once. We built those three into the product instead of into notifications.

Does it cost anything?

Free plan: two sets a day, all dictation and the first 2 full mock papers, no card required. Premium is $9.90 a month, opens all 5 full mock papers, and covers the parent side: the weekly email, the skill curves over time and the PSLE report. It is free for a limited time, unlocked with a code, with nothing charged.

Is my child's data safe?

No ads, no data selling, no sharing with third parties. We collect only what learning needs: a name or nickname, the level, and practice records. The weekly report is visible only to you and your child; whether to show a tutor is your call. See our privacy policy. Privacy policy →

Free class and assignment tools

Create classes, assign work, and see completion for the class and each student's mistakes — no more marking piles at home.

Materials on tap

Nearly 7,000 questions organised by level and knowledge point — use them online or print them. The prep time you save is your own.

What it does for your enrolment

Everything parents want above — auto-marking, mistakes retested, weekly reports — is what you hand them the moment your students use AceLah. When parents can see progress, renewals take care of themselves.