A child who is fine in Chinese generally, but loses marks on listening — this is one of the most common things parents bring to us. The short answer: what makes listening hard is not vocabulary, it is pace.

At home, a child can rewind, pause to look up a word, or ask a parent to read it again. In the exam hall, none of those three are available. So the gap between "can do it at home" and "holds up in the exam" is not word count — it is whether they have ever sat through a whole paper at exam pace.

How much listening counts in PSLE Chinese

PSLE Chinese includes a listening component for every candidate, whether they take Chinese or Higher Chinese — it is part of the mark, not an option. One point parents often ask about: at primary level, a Higher Chinese pupil's oral and listening are the same paper, not two separate sittings, and they are marked to the same standard as Chinese. Secondary level is arranged differently — see Higher Chinese.

This describes the general arrangement for 2026. MOE and SEAB rules can change from year to year, so go by your school's and SEAB's notices for the current year.

We wrote five papers, and the audio is free

Our teachers have written five mock listening papers for P5 and P6, now on the listening practice page: ten questions and twenty marks each, covering picture choice, sequencing, notices, predicting how a conversation ends, and the moral of a story. Every passage is played twice — first with the questions, then the passage alone — with about ten seconds to answer after the beep, the same rhythm as the exam.

The audio is free on YouTube and the papers and answers are free to download. These are practice papers, not past-year exam papers.

Five steps for using them

1. Download the paper and print it, or open it on a tablet. One paper at a time.
2. Play the track straight through. No pausing.
3. Each passage is played twice. Answer after the beep, not before.
4. Mark it only after the whole paper is done.
5. For every wrong answer, work out whether your child missed the words, or heard them and still chose wrongly.

Step five is the one worth the time. Missing the words is a listening problem; hearing them and still choosing wrongly is a reading-the-question problem — and the two need completely different practice. The first needs more exposure; the second needs the habit of marking what the question actually asks before the audio starts. Counting those two kinds of mistakes separately tells you far more than the score does.

After the five papers

Listening is built by steady exposure, not by cramming. When the five are done, keep going with our free story videos, or use the current-affairs material on the news page. Primary pupils also receive a story-library account one month after enrolling — over 2,000 Chinese stories to read along with and record at home. For families who do not speak much Mandarin at home, that step often does more than another paper would.

Go to the listening practice page →

If you would like a teacher to look at which kind of mark your child is losing, start with a trial lesson: group trials are free, a one-to-one trial is S$30 for two hours. We are in Bugis, and in-centre group classes are capped at 6 pupils.