How to Say Hello in Chinese: Every Greeting and When to Use It

By Ray Banks·July 4, 2026·Phrases

The standard way to say hello in Chinese is 你好 (nǐ hǎo) — literally "you good." It is understood by every Mandarin speaker on earth, in Beijing and in Taipei, and it is never rude. What phrasebooks leave out is that fluent speakers use it far less than beginners expect: 你好 is a first-meeting greeting, and between people who already know each other it can sound like a textbook reading itself aloud.

How do you say hello to someone you've just met?

This is the situation 你好 was built for: a stranger, an introduction, a shop, a first email. If you learn nothing else on this page, learn these four. 您好 swaps in 您 (nín), the respectful "you" — you'll hear it constantly from service staff and from northern Mainland speakers; Taiwan speakers use it too, but reach for it a little less often in casual speech.

How do Chinese speakers actually greet people they know?

They use a name, a title, or a question — almost never 你好. Walk into a Chinese office and you'll hear 王经理 (Wáng jīnglǐ, "Manager Wang"), 李姐 (Lǐ jiě, "Sister Li"), or just 早 (zǎo). A student passing a teacher in the hallway says 老师好 (lǎoshī hǎo). The pattern is role or name + 好, and it is far warmer than 你好 because it says "I know who you are."

This is the single biggest gap between textbook Chinese and street Chinese, and it's the reason learners who say 你好 to a friend every morning get a puzzled half-smile back. Between friends, the greeting is usually a question — an observation about the situation you're both in ("你来啦" — "oh, you're here") does the job that "hey, what's up" does in English.

How do you say good morning and good evening in Chinese?

Mandarin builds time greetings on one template: time of day + 好. 早上好 (zǎoshang hǎo), 下午好 (xiàwǔ hǎo), 晚上好 (wǎnshang hǎo). There is also an older, softer template with 安 (ān, "peace"): 早安, 午安, 晚安. Which template you hear depends on where you are — and this is the split almost no other guide on this query marks.

In Mainland China, 早上好 is the everyday standard in schools and workplaces; 早安 turns up mostly in writing, song lyrics, or between partners and family. In Taiwan the balance flips: 早安 is the normal spoken greeting, with 午安 and 晚安 rounding out the set, and 早上好 sounds a bit imported. Both sides understand both, so neither choice will confuse anyone — but matching the local habit is the difference between sounding studied and sounding local. (Our app handles this the same way it handles food vocabulary that differs across the strait: pick a region and the text follows it.)

How do you say hello on the phone in Chinese?

You don't say 你好 — you say 喂 (wéi). It is a dedicated telephone word, the way English "hello?" with a rising question mark belongs to phone calls in a way "hi" doesn't. Pick up, say 喂, and only then move into 你好 or the person's name.

Tone matters here more than usual. The dictionary form is fourth tone, wèi — that's the shout-across-the-street "hey!" A phone greeting is normally said in a rising second tone, wéi, which softens it into "hello?" Using the falling tone on a call sounds curt, like barking "what."

Regional greetings: 你吃了吗 and the ones you only hear

"Have you eaten?" is the greeting foreigners hear about most and understand least. 你吃了吗 (nǐ chī le ma) isn't an invitation to lunch and isn't really about food — it's a warm, slightly old-fashioned way of asking whether you're doing all right, born in a period when eating well genuinely was the measure of that. The honest answer is 吃了 (chī le, "yes") or 还没 (hái méi, "not yet"), and then the conversation moves on. In Taiwan the same greeting usually surfaces as 吃饱了没 (chī bǎo le méi) — "are you full?" rather than "did you eat?" — and it skews older and more rural on both sides of the strait.

Then there's the greeting you'll hear a hundred times and never say: 欢迎光临 (huānyíng guānglín), chorused by staff as you walk into a shop or restaurant. It's said to customers, so you don't return it — a nod or a 你好 is plenty.

Every way to say hello in Chinese, compared

One table, five questions answered: what it is, how it's pronounced, when it fits, how formal it lands, and where it's normal.

Mistakes to avoid when saying hello in Chinese

These five account for most of the awkward moments learners report — and every one of them is easy to fix.

• Treating 你好吗 like "how are you." In English, "how are you" is noise: you say it, you get "good, you?", nobody learns anything. 你好吗 is a real enquiry — closer to "are you doing okay?" Ask it of a friend every morning and they'll wonder what you've heard about them. Use 最近怎么样 or just 早 instead.
• Saying 喂 face to face. 喂 belongs to the telephone. In person it lands as "oi" — fine for flagging down a friend across a car park, wrong for greeting your host's mother.
• Greeting friends and family with 你好. This is the stiff-textbook tell. With people who know you, use a name, a title, or a situational remark. 你好 between close friends can even read as sarcastic distance, like shaking your brother's hand.
• Mixing up 晚上好 and 晚安. 晚上好 opens an evening; 晚安 ends it. Saying 晚安 as you arrive at a dinner tells everyone you're leaving before you've sat down.
• Pronouncing 你好 as two flat third tones. Two third tones in a row don't both dip — the first becomes a rising tone, so 你好 comes out ní hǎo. The pinyin is still written nǐ hǎo, which is why the written form and the spoken form disagree. Our guide to reading pinyin covers the rest of these sound changes.

你好, character by character

Chinese greetings are unusually transparent once you split them. Learning why 你好 means what it means costs five minutes and pays back across dozens of other phrases.

Put them side by side and 你好 is "you — good," a compressed way of saying "may you be well." That's also why the 好 template is so productive: anything + 好 becomes a greeting to that thing. 大家好 (everyone-good), 老师好 (teacher-good), 早上好 (morning-good), 你们好 (you-plural-good). Learn the pattern rather than the phrases and you can greet a room, a title, or a time of day without looking anything up.

The traditional forms of both characters are identical to the simplified ones — 你好 is written the same way in Taipei and in Shanghai. That's not true of every greeting on this page: 你們好, 最近怎麼樣, 歡迎光臨, and 好久不見 all change. If you're learning traditional characters, our traditional-character reading practice serves every story in traditional script.

Why 你好 is less common than your textbook suggests

Here's a number that surprised us. Across the 658 graded stories in the Literate Chinese catalog — 141,730 characters of running text, measured July 2026 — 你 is the 18th most frequent character (1,288 occurrences) and 好 is the 24th (977). Both are top-25 characters, so learning 你好 hands you two of the most useful characters in the language. But almost none of those 977 uses of 好 are the greeting. They're 好吃 (tasty), 好看 (good-looking), 你好吗, 好的 (okay). The greeting itself shows up mainly where two characters meet for the first time.

That matches what happens in life. Chinese social language is built around relationship position rather than a single all-purpose token: you address someone as what they are to you — 老师, 阿姨, 王哥, 妈 — and the address itself is the greeting. A generic 你好 skips that step, which is exactly right for a stranger and slightly cold for anyone else. It isn't that Chinese speakers are less friendly with greetings; it's that the friendliness lives in the title, not in the hello.

The practical upshot for a learner: spend less energy collecting greeting variants and more on learning the titles and names of the people around you. If you can say 张老师 correctly, you rarely need 你好 again.

Practise these greetings in a real story

Greetings are hard to drill from a list because their whole meaning is situational. Reading them in dialogue fixes that fast. These free browser stories all open with the greetings above, in simplified or traditional, with per-word pinyin and audio:

• What's Your Name? — 你好 in its native habitat: two strangers exchanging names.
• Are You a Teacher? — 你好 plus 老师, the title-as-greeting pattern in action.
• Are You Okay? — the one story where 你好吗 is used correctly: someone genuinely checking in.

If you want more of this, the full Chinese reading practice library and our graded readers guide both start at exactly this level. And for the phrases either side of hello, the Chinese phrases guide collects them all.