If your child is struggling with reading or comprehension passages, one of the root causes is forgetting many words from previous levels.
Many students focus on practising the upcoming spelling or specific chapters they will be tested on, and almost never review words from previous levels. So when kids doing comprehension come across these forgotten words, they can’t understand it and struggle with reading.
In this blog post, we explore how to rebuild your child’s Chinese foundation by mastering the most important words from previous levels. Spoiler alert: knowing the key high-frequency words allows your child to understand 70% of a P6 Paper 2 exam.
Why High-Frequency Words?
There are A LOT of words in the primary school syllabus (2000+ by the time you reach P6). That’s why students tend to only focus on the words that are taught this year – because they don’t have the energy to review the 1000-2000+ words from previous years even if it’s critical.
Plus not all words are equally important – 宽阔 and 炮弹树 come from the same chapter, but the former appear far more frequently in exams. So why not prioritise words that constantly appear.
This is backed by science. Multiple studies have consistently found acquiring high-frequency vocabulary is particularly effective for language learning, and is strongly related to reading comprehension ability of second language learners.
High-frequency words also give struggling students more confidence. Being unable to read many words in a story or comprehension is incredibly demoralising. But when students look at a passage and can understand most of the words, they gain confidence to ace comprehension.
Why do We Need High-Frequency Words for Chinese but not English
Because English is your child’s first language. Since kids are constantly exposed to English, high-frequency words appear naturally in their daily lives and become second nature.
Unfortunately, kids have almost zero exposure to Chinese outside class. If kids aren’t reading books or watching Youtube in Chinese, they aren’t picking up high-frequency words organically.
Which is a problem – because high-frequency words naturally appear the most often in exams, so not knowing them means a lot more chances of mistakes.
What high frequency list should I use?
If you are just looking for a general high-frequency list (i.e. suitable for all learners including overseas students and adult learners), HackingChinese has a good list here. But he also issues the following warning:
“The problem is that students have a simplistic view of what frequency lists are and what they can be used for. It’s easy to grab a list off the internet and use it as an absolute reference, believing it to show the most common Chinese words [without realising] all frequency data is based on a small fraction of all language.”
But while general wordlists aren’t bad, it’s not very effective from the perspective of rebuilding your child’s foundation quickly as it contains words that aren’t part of the PSLE syllabus. This is because most standard wordlists are based on native speaker material meant for adults like China newspapers and Weibo.
Words that like 民众俱乐部，日期，地点 that appear constantly in letter writing(便条) aren’t found in standard top 500 wordlists
Unfortunately, there aren’t any existing wordlist that is actually based off the MOE exams, and that’s why we built our own high-frequency wordlist.
Because we know that time is the most
We took 300+ top school exam papers, and ran through an arduous process of digitalising, data-cleaning and analysing each paper to determine which words kept appearing over and over again in the exam.
To maximise revision effectiveness and ensure every word is relevant, we went one step further to priortise words that appear in the core 识读识写 wordlist, and also categorised words by level.
So while we might be a little biased, we believe we’ve created the best high-frequency wordlist to rebuild your child’s foundation!
The results
So how well does VocabKing’s high-frequency list work? We ran blind tests on 10 different P6 prelim papers, and we found that knowing just the words from our high-frequency list (30% of core words) allowed a student to understand an average of ~70% of the exams (and even 80+% on some easier comprehension passages).
In our opinion, that’s pretty efficient usage of time! Conversely, imagine if your child didn’t know these words.
NOTE: We aren’t saying you only need these words. But to rebuild the foundation effectively, your child definitely wants to first master the words that keep appearing in exams. And you can easily do it during the June holidays.
If you would like to rebuild your child’s Chinese foundation, sign up for a 7-day free trial now or whatsapp us for more information.
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