To HCL or CL in primary 4?
I think the key point is your children’s Teacher thinks that your children has potential in Chinese that’s why they recommend your children to take HCL. Now I would encourage my children to take HCL in primary 5 as that is no disadvantage at all. Just treat it like a trial, if one can make it then good, else nothing is lost. Your children still continue on in primary 6 with PSLE Chinese.
I have one student who was offered primary 4 HCL as she topped her class in Chinese in primary 3. Coming to end of Primary 4, she found that there are challenges like higher standard in Composition (using canned paragraphs and good phrases meant nothing now), new summary question is hard, new higher order thinking questions are tough too. And the few “what’s wrong with this characters/nouns” type of questions are super hard on her. But She has grown much stronger too as she still aced her HCL this year.
Extra notes:
HCL and Cl is completely different papers: HCL has 3 higher order thinking questions (CL has 1) and summary question(CL don’t have). And HCL has about 25% more vocabulary to study than CL. So Don’t say CL comprehension is as hard as HCL ones, HCL is so much more difficult than CL ones.