How to Say Welcome in Chinese: 欢迎 vs 不客气

By Ray Banks·October 27, 2026·Phrases

English uses the word "welcome" for two jobs that Chinese keeps completely separate. To greet someone who has arrived, say 欢迎 huān yíng. To answer someone's 谢谢 — the English "you're welcome" — say 不客气 bù kè qi. Swapping them is the single most common mistake English speakers make with this phrase: if a Chinese speaker thanks you and you reply 欢迎, you have just said "I greet your arrival," which is confusing rather than gracious.

Which "welcome" do you actually mean?

Before you choose a phrase, decide which of the two English meanings you're translating. There is no overlap between them in Chinese, and the mistake is not subtle to a native ear.

Meaning 1: greeting an arrival. Someone walks into your home, your office, your country, your video call. This is 欢迎 territory. The word is transitive — 欢迎你 "we welcome you," 欢迎来到北京 "welcome to Beijing" — and it can be used on signage, in speeches, and in ordinary conversation.

Meaning 2: replying to thanks. Someone says 谢谢 and English politeness requires an answer. This is 不客气 territory, along with 不用谢, 没事, and Taiwan's 不会. None of these contain the character 迎, because none of them have anything to do with arriving.

A useful test: could you replace the English "welcome" with "come in, we're glad you're here"? Then it's 欢迎. Could you replace it with "no problem"? Then it's 不客气. Once you internalise this split, the rest of the post is just picking the right register.

How do you say "you're welcome" in Chinese?

不客气 is the safe default everywhere, and no one will ever find it wrong. But Chinese has a genuinely wide range of replies to 谢谢, and the choice signals how close you are to the person and how big a deal the favour was.

One more thing English speakers find odd: you are allowed to say nothing. Between close friends and inside families, a small 谢谢 often gets a nod, a wave of the hand, or a 嗯 — and that silence isn't rudeness. Filling every thank-you with a full 不客气 is a mild tell that you learned Chinese from a textbook.

How do you welcome someone who arrives?

This is the 欢迎 family. The base word can stand alone, but in real speech it's usually doubled, extended, or attached to a destination.

欢迎 also hides inside a word learners meet early: 受欢迎 shòu huān yíng, "popular" — literally "receiving welcome." In our free story about Walt Disney, a cartoon character is described as 很受欢迎, "very popular." Once you notice that, the compound stops being an arbitrary vocabulary item.

What do you actually say when a guest walks in?

Here's the thing textbooks skip: a Chinese host rarely stops at 欢迎. The welcome is a short sequence of phrases pushing the guest to relax and stop being polite. If you learn only these five, you will sound like a good host.

Welcome in Chinese: the full comparison

The fastest way to keep the two families apart is to see them in one table, sorted by what you're actually doing when you speak.

Character breakdown: why 欢迎 and 不客气 mean what they mean

Both phrases are transparent once you take them apart, and taking them apart is what makes them stay in memory.

不客气 is also cheap to learn from a reading standpoint. 不 is the 8th most frequent character across the 658 graded stories in the Literate Chinese catalog (July 2026), appearing 1,773 times; 客 and 气 are common enough that the whole phrase costs you almost nothing new. 欢迎 is the pricier of the two — neither 欢 nor 迎 cracks our top 150 characters, which is why beginners meet 不客气 long before they meet 欢迎光临.

Mistakes to avoid

• Answering 谢谢 with 欢迎. The headline error, and it comes straight from English. 谢谢 → 不客气. Nothing in the 欢迎 family ever answers a thank-you.
• Saying 欢迎光临 to a friend at your front door. It's the recorded greeting in every 7-Eleven in Taipei and every supermarket in Shanghai. Using it at home is the equivalent of greeting a dinner guest with "welcome to Applebee's." Use 欢迎欢迎 or just 快请进.
• Writing the sandhi form as if it were the real tone. 不 is bù in isolation but becomes bú before a fourth-tone syllable, so 不客气 is spoken bú kè qi and 不用谢 is bú yòng xiè. Dictionaries — including ours — print the citation tone bù; your mouth should produce bú. The same rule and its cousins are covered in our guide to Chinese tones.
• Using 哪里哪里 to answer thanks. 哪里哪里 nǎ lǐ nǎ lǐ (literally "where, where?") deflects a compliment, not a thank-you — someone praises your Chinese and you demur. It's also noticeably old-fashioned; younger speakers are likelier to say 没有没有 méi yǒu méi yǒu or 还好啦 hái hǎo la. Say it after 谢谢 and you'll get a puzzled look.
• Thanking close family constantly. Chinese 谢谢 carries more distance than English "thanks." Thank your mother for passing the rice at every meal and you'll be told 跟我还客气什么 gēn wǒ hái kè qi shén me — "why are you being formal with me?" That's the same 客气 again, and it's the cultural core of this whole page.

The culture behind 客气: why welcome is a negotiation

English politeness is largely additive — you add "please," "thank you," "you're welcome," and more is safer. Chinese hospitality often runs the other way: the host's job is to remove formality, and the guest's job is to resist just enough to show they aren't taking advantage. That's why so many welcome phrases are negative in form. 不客气. 别客气. 不用谢. 没事. Each one says "stand down, you don't have to be careful with me."

This is also why food arrives whether or not you asked for it, why your teacup gets refilled before it's empty, and why saying "no thanks, I'm fine" once is treated as an opening bid. None of it is theatre — it's a genuinely different idea of what politeness is for. In English, politeness marks respect at a distance. In Chinese, the warmest thing you can do is close the distance and tell someone they no longer need it.

You can watch the mechanism run in short stories. In our free beginner story A New Morning, an elderly man who has been helped up says 谢谢你，小伙子 — "thank you, young man." Notice how little else is needed: the thanks is brief, the moment moves on, and nobody makes a speech. That's the normal register, and it's a better model than any dialogue built to drill vocabulary.

Mainland vs Taiwan: the practical differences

The 欢迎 side of this page is essentially identical across the strait — 歡迎光臨 greets you in Taipei and 欢迎光临 greets you in Chengdu, differing only in script. The "you're welcome" side is where the two Mandarins genuinely part company.

In Taiwan, the default reply to 謝謝 is 不會 bù huì, said bú huì, roughly "not at all." Mainland speakers almost never use 不会 this way — there it means "cannot" or "won't," so the first time a Taiwanese friend answers your thanks with it, it can register as a non-sequitur. Taiwanese speakers also use 不客氣 freely, so it remains the safest single answer if you're moving between regions.

In the Mainland north, especially Beijing, 没事儿 méi shìr with its rhotic ending does most of the casual work. Southern Mainland speakers tend toward plain 没事 or 不用谢. None of this is a correctness question — it's the same distinction as "no worries" versus "sure thing" in English. We go through the vocabulary that actually differs between the two Mandarins in Taiwan vs Mainland Mandarin, and the app lets you set your region so stories and audio follow it.

Traditional-character readers: 欢迎 is 歡迎, 不客气 is 不客氣, 没事 is 沒事, 请进 is 請進, 别客气 is 別客氣. If you're learning traditional, our traditional Chinese reading practice runs the entire catalog in traditional script.

How to actually make these stick

Phrase lists are easy to read and hard to retain, because a list gives you no situation to hang the words on. The fix is meeting the phrase in a sentence where something is happening: a cat announcing 欢迎来到城堡, an old man saying 谢谢你, a shop door chiming 欢迎光临. Two or three encounters like that beat twenty flashcard reps, because you remember the scene and the phrase comes with it.

That's the whole design of the Literate Chinese catalog — 658 graded stories, sorted so the words you know cover almost everything on the page. If you'd like a starting point, read a free story in your browser, or browse the rest of the Chinese phrases guide for the neighbouring expressions: greetings, apologies, and the rest of the daily kit.