Chinese greetings: 你好 and what else to say

The most common Chinese greetings are 你好 nǐ hǎo (hello), the polite 您好 nín hǎo, 早上好 zǎoshang hǎo or 早安 zǎo'ān (good morning), 晚上好 wǎnshang hǎo (good evening) and 晚安 wǎn'ān (good night), and the goodbyes 再见 zàijiàn and 拜拜 báibái. Textbooks start with 你好, and rightly: in Chinese film and television subtitles it is said 15.6 times as often as the polite 您好. Mandarin greetings are strings of characters with no spaces between words, so for this page we counted each phrase in the running text of every subtitle, in simplified and in traditional characters. Below are the greetings in Mandarin with pinyin and when to use each, the counts, and the famous "have you eaten?", which turns out to be rare on screen.

Updated 5 November 2026 · 8 min read

The greetings in Chinese

你 nǐ and 您 nín are both "you"; 您 is the respectful one. 早 zǎo on its own is a common short "morning!", and jiàn, "see", is the end of every "see you": 明天见, 回头见 (huítóu jiàn, see you later), 下次见 (xiàcì jiàn, see you next time).

你好 or 您好?

你好 is right with almost everyone. 您好 adds respect: it is what you say to a teacher, an older stranger or a customer, and what a shop, hotel or call centre says to you. Among friends 您好 would sound stiff. The same 您 turns up in "how are you?": 您好吗 is the polite form of 你好吗.

The goodbye works the same way. 再见 is neutral and fine everywhere; 拜拜, the English "bye-bye" borrowed into Mandarin (also written 掰掰), is the casual one. 慢走, literally "walk slowly", is what a host says to a guest at the door: take your time, go safely.

Which Chinese greetings do films say most?

We read the Chinese releases of OpenSubtitles 2018, 122,257,630 characters of subtitles in simplified characters and 10,301,760 in traditional characters, found every greeting in the running text, and removed the repeated uploads of the same film. Counts are per million characters, so the two columns can be compared.

What the counts show:

• 你好 is the hello, and 嗨 keeps pace with it. In the simplified subtitles 嗨 hāi and 你好 are level; in the traditional ones 你好 is slightly ahead. 嗨 is the English "hi" written in Chinese characters, and it also does the work of "hey", so part of its count is not a greeting. Many subtitles are translations from other languages, which may favour a loanword like 嗨.
• 您好 is rare. 你好 is said 15.6 times as often. Part of the reason is probably the setting: films are full of friends, families and enemies, and have few shop counters.
• 再见 beats 拜拜 by 9.5 to one in simplified subtitles. On screen, the formal goodbye wins.
• Good night beats good morning. 晚安 alone is said more often than 早上好 and 早安 together, as buenas noches beats buenos días in Spanish greetings: goodnight is said at every bedtime scene.
• Have you eaten? hardly appears. 吃了吗 and 吃饭了吗 together come once for every 85 你好.

Two of the phrases need care. 你好 also sits inside other phrases: 祝你好运 is "good luck", 你好像 is "you seem", 也是为你好 is "it's for your own good". So 你好 was counted only where it stands as its own clause, between punctuation or at the start or end of a line, and the same for the other short greetings. 再见 is also "to see again" (再见到, 我们会再见的), and those are left out. The last column of the table says what was counted for each.

Simplified and traditional subtitles

Traditional characters are used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, simplified ones in mainland China and Singapore. The subtitle files do not say where they were made, so the comparison is between the two scripts, not between places. Most greetings sit at much the same rate in both, but one stands out.

• 早安 and 早上好. In simplified subtitles 早上好 is the usual "good morning", said 2.0 times as often as 早安. In traditional subtitles the two are level.
• 再见 is a little more frequent in traditional subtitles, 1.16 times its simplified rate.
• 拜拜 needs a footnote in traditional characters: in Taiwan the same two characters also mean to worship at a temple, so its count there is a ceiling.

Have you eaten?

吃饭了吗 chīfàn le ma, "have you eaten?", is the greeting every guide to Chinese culture mentions. Wikipedia's article on phatic expressions describes it as the equivalent of English "how are you?": a way of saying hello, not a question about lunch. You answer it with 吃了 chī le ("I have") or 还没 hái méi ("not yet"), and nobody expects a menu.

The counts show how little of it reaches the screen. One likely reason is that it is a greeting between people who share each other's daily routine, and a subtitle translated from English rarely has a line that calls for it. It is real and it is warm, but on this evidence it is not the greeting to learn first.

Answering a greeting

• 你好! — Hello! (The answer to 你好 is 你好.)
• 我很好, 谢谢, 你呢? — Wǒ hěn hǎo, xièxie, nǐ ne? — I'm fine, thanks, and you?
• 还行. — Hái xíng. — Not bad.
• 很高兴认识你. — Nice to meet you. 我也是. — Wǒ yě shì. — Me too.
• 明天见! — See you tomorrow!

谢谢 xièxie, the word that follows most greetings, is counted against other languages in which language says thank you most, and 你好 is compared with the hellos of seven other languages in hello and goodbye, ranked. In Shanghai, the same hello is 侬好 non hau, as hello and thank you in Shanghainese explains.

Learn them in a sentence

Greetings open the free Mandarin course, Verbavia (our own course), with pinyin, characters and a recording of each, and 你好 is in the course's Mandarin word list. Each greeting is also a tone exercise: 你好 is two third tones, which Mandarin tones explains. More beginner sets: colors in Chinese, Chinese numbers 1 to 100, the days of the week in Chinese and the months of the year. For the Spring Festival there is a page of its own: Chinese New Year 2027 greetings.

After the greetings come the people you greet: family members in Chinese, where 叔叔 and 阿姨, uncle and aunt, are also said to strangers of your parents' age.

Sources

• The counts are from the OPUS release of OpenSubtitles 2018, Chinese (Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J., 2016, aclanthology.org), the simplified file zh_cn.txt.gz and the traditional file zh_tw.txt.gz. Each was read once. Every phrase was found in the running text, the characters on either side of it were recorded, and a line holding a greeting was counted only the first time it appeared with the two lines before and after it, which removes duplicate uploads. The method and every rule are in scripts/frequency_greetings_zh.py, and the counts are committed in research/greetings-zh-counts/ and printed from there rather than typed.
• Wiktionary: 你好, 您好, 再見, 拜拜, 喂, 嗨, 幸會 and 慢走, for the meanings and uses.
• Wikipedia: Phatic expression, on 吃饭了吗 as the equivalent of "how are you?".