How to Say Sorry in Chinese (and When Not To)

By Ray Banks·September 25, 2026·Phrases

"Sorry" in Chinese is 对不起 (對不起), pronounced duì bu qǐ. That's the answer every textbook gives, and it's correct — but it's also the reason foreigners in China and Taiwan sound slightly off for years. 对不起 is heavier than the English "sorry." It carries fault. For the bump on the subway, the late reply, the "sorry, could I squeeze past" — the phrase native speakers actually reach for is 不好意思 (bù hǎoyìsi). Getting that one distinction right will do more for how you sound than the next twenty phrases you learn.

对不起 or 不好意思? The distinction that matters most

Think of it as a weight difference. 对不起 admits fault: I did something, it affected you, I accept responsibility. 不好意思 admits awkwardness: this situation is a little embarrassing and I'm acknowledging it. English collapses both into "sorry," which is why learners over-fire the heavy one.

If you spill water on a stranger's bag, that's 对不起. If you need them to move their bag so you can sit down, that's 不好意思. Use 对不起 for the second one and you'll get a puzzled look — you've just made a formal admission of guilt over a seat.

There's a useful test: could you say the English sentence with a shrug? Then it's 不好意思. Does it need eye contact? Then it's 对不起. And if you're writing it rather than saying it — an email, a notice, a message to a client — it's usually 抱歉.

What do the characters in 对不起 actually mean?

对不起 is not three random syllables; it's a grammar pattern you'll meet again and again, so it's worth taking apart.

The shape is verb + 不 + 起, a potential complement meaning "cannot manage to do it." 对得起 duì de qǐ means "to be able to face someone" — to have done right by them. Flip 得 to 不 and 对不起 is "I can't face you." That's a stronger sentiment than "sorry" and it explains the whole usage rule: the phrase is built out of guilt, so it sounds like guilt.

The same pattern runs through everyday Chinese: 买得起 / 买不起 (can / can't afford it), 看得起 / 看不起 (to respect / to look down on someone). Once you see 对不起 as a member of that family rather than a fixed lump, it stops being an arbitrary word — this is the kind of pattern the Chinese grammar guide covers point by point.

不好意思 breaks down just as neatly. 好意思 hǎo yìsi means roughly "to have the nerve / the face to do something" — 你好意思吗? is a real (and cutting) question meaning "you're not embarrassed?" Negate it and 不好意思 is "I don't have the face for this," which is why it reads as mild embarrassment rather than guilt. And 抱歉 is 抱 "to hold, to embrace" + 歉 "regret" — literally carrying your regret.

How do you apologise when you've actually done something wrong?

When there's real fault — you broke something, missed a deadline, hurt someone — Chinese escalates by adding intensity words and by naming the fault, not by picking an exotic phrase. Here are the ones that carry weight.

One pattern worth copying: sincere apologies in Chinese usually name the thing. 对不起，我来晚了 ("sorry, I'm late") lands better than a bare 对不起, which can sound like you're closing the topic rather than owning it.

That line is from Finding a Way, a free office story in our browser reader, and it's a good template: apology, the specific mistake, the fix. Three clauses, no grovelling.

How do you say sorry for small, everyday things?

This is the bucket that swallows most real-life apologies — and almost none of them use 对不起.

麻烦你了 deserves a moment. English has no clean equivalent — it's the thing you say when someone has done you a favour that cost them effort. It acknowledges the burden rather than the kindness, and using it correctly is a strong signal that you understand how politeness works in Chinese. In Taiwan the standard reply to it is 不會 bù huì (said bú huì) — "no trouble at all."

How do you say "excuse me" in Chinese?

"Excuse me" is really three different jobs, and Chinese uses a different phrase for each. This is where most travellers go wrong.

The safe default across all three regions is 不好意思 — it works to flag someone down in a restaurant, to interrupt, and (with a step sideways) to get past. If you only remember one "excuse me," remember that one. If you want the sharper local version, take 借过 to Taipei and 让一下 to Beijing. Our app swaps this kind of regional vocabulary automatically based on which Mandarin you're studying, the same way it swaps 地铁 for 捷运.

How do you respond when someone apologises to you?

Don't say 谢谢. English speakers reflexively thank people who apologise; in Chinese that reads as accepting an accusation. The reply is a dismissal of the fault.

Which apology should I use? A comparison table

Mistakes to avoid

These are the five errors I hear most often from intermediate learners — including from people who have been studying for years.

• Using 对不起 for everything. The single most common error. Saying 对不起 when you brush someone's coat on the bus is like saying "I deeply regret my actions" — technically an apology, tonally absurd. Default to 不好意思 and reserve 对不起 for fault.
• Apologising to close family for small things. In Chinese families, formal apologies between parents and children or between spouses over trivia can read as coldness — the formality puts distance where intimacy should be. 是我不好 or 我错了 does the same job without the chill, and often the right move is simply to fix the thing.
• Using 对不起 to mean "excuse me, may I ask." If your next sentence is a question, you want 请问. 对不起，请问… is fine, but 对不起 alone leaves the listener waiting for what you did wrong.
• Answering an apology with 谢谢. A reflex carried over from English. Say 没关系 or 没事. Answering 对不起 with 谢谢 sounds like you're thanking someone for confessing.
• Over-pronouncing the middle syllables. 对不起 is not duì bù qǐ with a punchy fourth-tone 不. In natural speech the 不 is unstressed and toneless: duì-bu-qǐ, weight on the first and last syllables. The same goes for 不好意思, where 意思 reduces to yìsi. If your apologies sound robotic, this is usually why — and it's a good reason to learn phrases from audio rather than from a pinyin chart. (How to read pinyin covers neutral tone and tone sandhi in detail.)

When is apologising the wrong move?

Here's the part the phrase lists leave out. In Chinese-speaking contexts, an apology can be the socially wrong response even when something has genuinely gone wrong — because it draws a line between two people who are supposed to be on the same side.

Between close friends and family, over-apologising is often read as 见外 jiànwài: treating an insider like an outsider. If a friend buys you lunch and you launch into 不好意思，不好意思, you're performing a distance that the relationship doesn't have. The warmer reply is to accept it and reciprocate next time. The same instinct explains why a Chinese parent who has wronged you may never say 对不起 and will instead cut fruit and put it in front of you — the repair happens through action, not through a formula. That's not emotional evasion so much as a different grammar for the same message.

Conversely, in service and workplace settings apologies are more formulaic than in English: 不好意思 opens half the interactions in a Taiwanese shop, and 抱歉 appears on signs where English would say "we regret any inconvenience." So the rule isn't "Chinese speakers apologise less." It's that the phrases cluster at the polite-distance end of the spectrum, and thin out as relationships get closer — the exact opposite of the English pattern, where we say "sorry" to our partners constantly and "excuse me" to strangers.

See these phrases in real stories

Phrase lists fade; sentences stick. Both apologies in this post show up in free stories you can read in the browser right now, with tap-to-look-up on every word:

• Finding a Way — an office worker emails the wrong file and writes 对不起，刚才的文件发错了. A textbook case of a fault-based apology with the fix attached.
• The Boss' Praise — 小郭 gets complimented in a meeting and 有点不好意思. This is 不好意思 in its other sense: not "sorry" at all, but "a bit embarrassed."
• The Tortoise and the Hare — the hare's 对不起…我不该那么骄傲 is a genuine apology, which is exactly when 对不起 is the right word.

That second one is worth dwelling on: 不好意思 is an adjective as often as it's an apology. Meeting it in both roles inside real sentences is how the distinction stops being a rule you memorised and becomes something you feel. More like this in our Chinese graded readers collection, and the full method is in how to learn Chinese by reading.

How common are these words, really?

One way to sanity-check a phrase list is to measure it. Across all 658 graded stories in the Literate Chinese catalog (141,730 hanzi occurrences, July 2026), 对 is the 100th most frequent character and 起 the 52nd — both firmly inside the first few hundred characters a learner meets. 意 (as in 不好意思) sits at 136th. In other words, the vocabulary of apologising isn't advanced material you get to later; it's built from characters that appear on nearly every page you'll read. Learn the phrases early and you get the characters for free.