How to Say Hello in Chinese (你好, nǐ hǎo)

Breaking 你好 into its parts explains why it works as a greeting and why it is not the only one.

你 (nǐ) is the ordinary word for "you" — one person, informal. It is the pronoun you will use with friends, colleagues at the same level, students, and anyone younger. Chinese does not have a separate familiar and formal set of pronouns the way French or German does, but it does have one politeness distinction: 你 versus 您.

好 (hǎo) means "good" and is one of the most productive characters in the language. It appears in 好看 (good-looking), 好吃 (tasty), 好像 (to seem), and hundreds of other words. As a greeting it functions almost like "well" in "be well" — the whole phrase is closer to a wish than to a statement.

Put together, 你好 is literally "you good", and that is exactly how it behaves: a short, friendly acknowledgement of the other person rather than a question expecting a detailed answer.

Both characters are third tone. A third tone is a dipping tone: the voice starts mid, drops low, and comes back up. Said slowly and in isolation, 你 is nǐ and 好 is hǎo, and both are written that way in every dictionary.

In continuous speech, two third tones in a row are physically awkward — the voice would have to dip twice in a row. Mandarin resolves this with tone sandhi: the first third tone turns into a second tone (a rising tone). So 你好 is spoken ní hǎo.

Three consequences follow, and all three matter for a learner:

• The written pinyin does not change. Dictionaries and subtitles keep nǐ hǎo, because the underlying tones are third-third. The spoken form is a phonetic realisation, not a different word.
• Audio and video will sound like "ní hǎo". If you are trying to match what you hear against a pinyin chart and it does not line up, this rule is usually why.
• The same rule applies to any two third tones in sequence, not only greetings. 你好, 很好 (hěn hǎo, "very good"), 可以 (kěyǐ, "can"), and 你好吗 all shift the first syllable upward.

Three things separate a recognisable 你好 from an unclear one: the pitch shape, the length, and the absence of English stress.

Pitch shape first. Practise the two syllables as a single contour: rise, then dip. Do not say "knee" and "how" as two separate English words — that gives you two flat syllables and no tone. Instead, hum the shape: up on the first syllable, down-and-up on the second.

Length second. Both syllables should be roughly equal and short. English speakers tend to lengthen the stressed syllable and reduce the other; Mandarin greetings are closer to even. A 你好 that lasts over a second sounds drawn out and unnatural.

Stress third. There is no stressed syllable. Do not put emphasis on 你. The whole phrase is delivered at a fairly level volume, with only the pitch moving.

A useful self-check: record yourself saying it, then listen for whether the second syllable dips below the first. If both syllables are at the same pitch, the tones are missing and a native speaker will hear an accent even though the consonants are fine.

Textbooks teach 你好 as the default greeting, and for a first greeting it is safe. In real conversation it is narrower than that, and using it in the wrong place sounds slightly stiff rather than rude.

你好 works well when you meet someone for the first time, when you greet a shop assistant or receptionist, when you open a phone call with a stranger, and whenever you are unsure which greeting fits. It never causes offence.

It sounds a little formal or distant between people who already know each other. Friends meeting in the street more often say 嗨 (hāi, borrowed from English "hi"), or skip the greeting and go straight to a question like 吃了吗 (chī le ma, "have you eaten") or 你去哪儿 (nǐ qù nǎr, "where are you going"). Those are not really questions needing answers — they function as greetings, the way "how are you" does in English.

With someone senior, use 您好. With a group, use 大家好 or 你们好. On the telephone, use 喂 — 你好 on the phone is understandable but unusual.

The single decision that changes the greeting is who you are addressing. Mandarin encodes politeness through word choice rather than verb forms, so the greeting itself carries the register.

您 (nín) is the polite "you". Visually it is 你 with 心 (heart) underneath, and that is a decent memory hook: the polite pronoun literally has more heart in it. 您好 goes with anyone you would call by title rather than by name — a teacher, a client, an older relative, an interviewer.

大家 (dàjiā) means "everyone". 大家好 is what you say at the start of a presentation, a class, or a video. It is the standard opening for anyone addressing a room, which makes it the greeting you will hear most often if you watch Chinese video content.

For people you already know, 好久不见 (hǎojiǔ bú jiàn, "long time no see") signals that you remember them and that time has passed — warmer than a plain 你好 and much more common between acquaintances than textbooks suggest.

Where English uses "good morning", "good afternoon" and "good evening", Mandarin uses the same 好 pattern with a time word in front: 早上好 (zǎoshang hǎo), 下午好 (xiàwǔ hǎo), 晚上好 (wǎnshang hǎo).

These are less frequent than their English equivalents. In practice 你好 covers most daytime situations, and the time-specific greetings appear in service settings, broadcasts, and formal openings more than in casual conversation.

One trap: 晚安 (wǎn'ān, "good night") is a farewell, not a greeting. Saying it when you meet someone in the evening is a real mistake, and a common one, because it looks like the direct translation of "good evening". Use 晚上好 to greet and 晚安 to part.

A second trap: 早上好 is fine, but the shortened 早 (zǎo) alone is what friends actually say to each other in the morning — a single syllable, very common, and never taught in a textbook chapter on greetings.

These are the errors that survive even after the tones are roughly right, because they come from mapping English habits onto Chinese.

• Treating it as a question. 你好 is not "how are you" and does not invite a report on your health. The "how are you" version is 你好吗 (nǐ hǎo ma), and even that is used far less in Chinese than its English counterpart.
• Answering 你好 with 你好. In Chinese this is acceptable but flat. The natural reply to 你好吗 is 我很好，谢谢 (wǒ hěn hǎo, xièxie) — "I am well, thank you" — and the natural reply to 你好 is simply 你好 back, or 你好 plus the person's name.
• Using 您 with close friends. Over-politeness reads as distance. If someone tells you 别这么客气 ("don't be so formal"), they are asking you to switch from 您 to 你.
• Adding 们 to address one person. 你们好 is for a group only. 你好们 does not exist.
• Saying 喂 in person. 喂 is telephone-only. In person it sounds like you are answering a phone call.

A greeting in Chinese is usually the first half of an exchange rather than a complete turn, and knowing the second half makes the first half land better.

The most useful follow-ups are 我叫… (wǒ jiào…, "my name is…"), 很高兴认识你 (hěn gāoxìng rènshi nǐ, "nice to meet you"), and 你叫什么名字 (nǐ jiào shénme míngzi, "what is your name"). Note that 很高兴认识你 puts the "very happy" before the "meet you" — the opposite order from English, and a place where word-for-word translation fails.

If you are the one being greeted in a service context, the expected reply is often 你好 plus an offer of help: 你好，需要什么？(nǐ hǎo, xūyào shénme?, "hello, what do you need?"). Recognising that pattern matters more than producing it.

Between friends, greetings and farewells blur into the same vocabulary. 再见 (zàijiàn, "goodbye") is the textbook farewell; in speech you will hear 拜拜 (báibái, from "bye-bye"), 回头见 (huítóu jiàn, "see you later"), and 明天见 (míngtiān jiàn, "see you tomorrow") far more often.

Greetings are the easiest part of spoken Chinese to recognise and the hardest to hear clearly, because they are short, they sit at the very start of a recording, and they are often said quickly or half-swallowed.

In practice, when you watch a Chinese video the opening seconds frequently carry a greeting like 大家好 or 你好, followed immediately by the actual topic. If you are learning from video rather than from a textbook, the useful move is to get the opening line written down accurately — the rest of the recording usually follows the same speaker, tempo and vocabulary.

That is the specific problem this site exists for: producing a timed Chinese text from a local video, with pinyin aligned to each character, so a greeting you only half-heard can be checked against the written form. The greeting itself is trivial once it is written down; the difficulty is that spoken Chinese gives you no spaces and no second chance.