How to Say You're Welcome in Chinese: 不客气, 不会, and 没事

By Ray Banks·September 23, 2026·Phrases

"You're welcome" in Chinese is 不客气 (不客氣), pronounced bù kèqi. That is the answer to 谢谢 you will hear all over Mainland China, and it is understood everywhere Mandarin is spoken. The catch is that it is not the answer you will hear most in Taiwan, where people wave off thanks with 不会 (不會) bù huì, and it is not the answer close friends give each other anywhere, which is usually a shrugged 没事 méi shì. Three phrases, three social distances. This post sorts out which one you want.

不客气 or 不会? The Mainland and Taiwan split

Ask a Beijing shop assistant for a bag, say 谢谢, and you will get 不客气. Do the same in a Taipei convenience store and you will almost certainly get 不会, usually fast and doubled: 不会不会. Both mean "you're welcome." The difference is one of the clearest spoken markers between the two Mandarins, and it is one that almost no phrasebook mentions.

不会 confuses learners because they already know 会 huì as "can" or "will." Here it is short for something like "it wouldn't trouble me" or "it was no bother." Taiwanese speakers themselves usually trace the habit to Taiwanese Hokkien, where the equivalent word is the normal answer to thanks, and it carried over into Mandarin. It is also the answer to 麻烦你了 ("sorry for the trouble") and to light apologies, so if you learn one deflection for Taiwan, this is it.

One nuance worth knowing: 不客气 is not absent from Taiwan. It survives in service scripts, in writing, and with strangers, where 不会 can feel a shade too familiar. In Taiwanese online discussions of the habit, a common line is that you say 不会 to people you know and 不客气 to people you don't. On the Mainland, by contrast, 不会 as a reply to thanks marks the speaker as Taiwanese immediately.

If you only want one rule: use 不客气 on the Mainland and with anyone you don't know, use 不会 in Taiwan with anyone you do. Our app follows the same logic, swapping regional vocabulary based on which Mandarin you are studying, the same way it swaps 地铁 for 捷运.

How do you say you're welcome to a friend?

Between friends, 不客气 can sound like a shop assistant. The natural replies shrink the whole thing down to "it's nothing," which is what a friend in English would say too.

There is a deeper point hiding in 客气什么. In Chinese, saying 谢谢 to a close friend for something small can itself feel slightly off, as if you were treating an insider like an outsider. So the friendly reply is often not a "you're welcome" at all, but a mild protest at having been thanked. If a friend answers your 谢谢 with 客气什么 or 跟我还客气 ("you're still being polite with me?"), it is a compliment. You have been promoted to the inner circle.

How do you say you're welcome at work or to a customer?

Professional replies do two things a casual one doesn't: they stay a little formal, and they often frame the help as part of the job. That framing is what makes them sound gracious rather than dismissive.

应该的 deserves a closer look because English has no equivalent. It says: you don't owe me, this was already mine to do. A hotel clerk says it, but so does a son who drove his mother to the hospital. In both cases it dissolves the debt that 谢谢 created, which is exactly what a good "you're welcome" is supposed to do.

Which "you're welcome" should I use? A comparison table

Mistakes to avoid

Five errors that show up constantly, including from people who have studied for years.

• Answering 谢谢 with 哪里哪里. 哪里哪里 nǎlǐ nǎlǐ ("where, where?") is the modest reply to a compliment: "your Chinese is great," "哪里哪里." Use it after "thanks for the ride" and it sounds like you've misheard. Thanks gets 不客气, praise gets 哪里哪里.
• Saying 不客气 in Taiwan on autopilot. It is perfectly understood, but the room says 不会. Matching it costs nothing and is the fastest way to stop sounding like a textbook that learned only one Mandarin. Hold 不客气 in reserve for formal moments and strangers.
• Hearing 不会 as "I can't." Learners who know 会 = "can" sometimes freeze when a Taiwanese cashier says 不会不会, wondering what they can't do. It is just "you're welcome." File it as a fixed phrase and move on.
• Getting the tone of 不 wrong. 不 is fourth tone on its own, but before another fourth tone it flips to second: bú kèqi, bú huì, búyòng. We write the citation tone on the cards; say the sandhi'd form. The pinyin guide covers this rule with more examples.
• Reaching for 没关系 every time. 没关系 méi guānxi answers 对不起, not 谢谢. Plenty of native speakers blur the line, so it isn't a disaster, but if you want to sound precise, keep 没关系 for apologies and 没事 or 不客气 for thanks.

What do the characters in 不客气 actually mean?

不客气 is transparent once you know that 客气 is a word in its own right, and a fairly important one.

客气 kèqi is "guest-manner": the careful, slightly distant politeness a guest shows in someone else's home. As an adjective it means "polite, courteous, standing on ceremony." So 不客气 literally tells the other person to drop the guest manners, i.e. you're not a guest here, there is nothing to repay. That is why the same two characters can mean "you're welcome" (as a reply), "don't be shy, eat" (from a host), and "he was not polite about it" (不客气地说, said bluntly). One concept, three surface meanings, and once you have the concept all three feel obvious.

不会 is 不 + 会 huì, "will / can / be likely to." As a reply it is an elliptical "it won't (be any trouble)," and in Taiwan it has fossilised into a fixed formula. 没事 is 没 méi "there isn't" + 事 shì "matter, business": there is no matter here, nothing happened worth mentioning. And 应该的 is 应该 yīnggāi "should, ought to" plus the nominalising 的, giving "the thing that ought to be done."

You will meet 客 and 气 again quickly. 客人 kèrén is "guest," 客户 kèhù is "client," 生气 shēngqì is "to get angry" (literally "to generate qi"), 天气 tiānqì is "weather." The Chinese grammar guide has more on how 不 and 别 divide up negation between statements and commands, which is the difference between 不客气 and 别客气.

Why "you're welcome" carries more social weight in Chinese

In English, "you're welcome" is close to punctuation. In Chinese the reply to thanks is doing real work, because 谢谢 itself is doing more work than "thanks." Thanking someone acknowledges a small debt, and among people who are supposed to be on the same side, debts are not supposed to exist. That is why 客气 shades into a mild criticism: 你太客气了 can mean "how kind" but also "you're keeping me at arm's length." Mainland friends will often tell a learner outright that they don't need to say 谢谢 so much.

Taiwan sits a little differently. 請、謝謝、對不起 are drilled into children as the three pillars of good manners, so 謝謝 flows more freely in Taipei than in Beijing, and the reply has adjusted to match: 不會 is short, quick, and low-ceremony, which is what you need when you are saying it forty times a day. So the pattern is not that one side is politer. It is that the Mainland tends to express closeness by skipping the thanks-and-reply exchange, while Taiwan expresses it by making the exchange light. Either way, the reply you choose signals how close you think you are, which is why it is worth choosing on purpose. For more on how the two Mandarins diverge in everyday speech, see Taiwan Mandarin vs Mainland Mandarin.

See these phrases in real stories

The neat thing about "you're welcome" in real speech is how often it isn't a phrase at all. Two free stories in our browser reader show the range:

• A New Morning: 小郭 helps an old man who has fallen at the subway station. The man says 谢谢你，小伙子, and 小郭's reply is a smile. That is realistic. Between strangers after a small kindness, a smile and a nod do the job of 不客气 more often than you'd think.
• Afternoon Mood: 小郭 is brooding over a mistake and his colleague 小王 pats him on the shoulder: 没事啦，每个人都会犯错. Here 没事 is doing its other job, reassuring after a slip rather than answering thanks. Same word, same instinct: there is nothing here worth worrying about.

Meeting a phrase in both roles inside real sentences is how it stops being a vocabulary item and becomes a reflex. There are hundreds more short stories like these in the Chinese reading practice library, and the same texts in Traditional characters in our Traditional reading practice collection.

How common are these characters, really?

Measured across the 658 graded stories in the Literate Chinese catalog (141,730 hanzi occurrences, July 2026), the pieces of the casual replies are among the most frequent characters in the language: 不 is the 8th most common character, 会 the 42nd, 没 the 49th, and 事 the 67th. So 不会 and 没事 are built entirely from characters you will meet on the first page of almost anything you read. 客 and 气, by contrast, do not appear in our top 150, which fits: 不客气 is a formula you say far more often than you read it. Learn it as a spoken chunk, and let the characters catch up later.