Saying "hi" / "嗨" in Chinese as a greeting

[Christa]

I was wondering, how do you find that people normally greet friends and acquaintances in Chinese?

 

Everyone tends to be taught 你好 initially, only to find out that this is actually fairly formal.

 

I tend to use "hi" / "嗨". Do you find this is what you yourself / Chinese native speakers you know use with Chinese friends and acquaintances?

 

Do you feel it is fairly informal?

 

Would love to hear any opinions you have 

 

Christina

[abcdefg]

Early in the day, first half of the morning, it's usually just “早” around here. The full "早上好“ maybe with strangers.

[Christa]

50 minutes ago, abcdefg said:

Early in the day, first half of the morning, it's usually just “早” around here. The full "早上好“ maybe with strangers.

 

Yes, that's true, you do hear those a lot.

 

Do you ever hear people using "hi" / "嗨"?

[somethingfunny]

嘿

你好

干嘛呀

[Jim]

I worked in the mountains in Sichuan for a while and if you met someone on the hill it was 上去呢  or 下去呢  as appropriate. 吃饭了? is another old school one.

[DavyJonesLocker]

or many times "hi" and "bye bye" in english

 

 

 

 

[陳德聰]

I hear “嗨，你好“ much more often than I hear simply “嗨”

[abcdefg]

12 hours ago, Christa said:

Do you ever hear people using "hi" / "嗨"?

 

No. Never heard it here as a "stand-alone" greeting. Not even once. (I have to wonder if 嗨 might be considered kind of "cute" and "girlish." I am an older male, so it wouldn't quite be appropriate.) 

 

Sometimes in the morning, a “早” will be met with a "你早“ in return.

[Bao]

Here in Hangzhou, I do sometimes hear 嗨 alone among youngish females.

 

Also of course “早”，“上班啦？”，“上课啦？” etc...

 

When briefly running into someone you know, I hear "诶！[insert name of person here]"。

Mother-in-law and I walked past a teacher she recognized and she goes "诶，张老师！" then turns to me and says "不知道他是不是姓张，不记得了，随便给他取了个张"

[vellocet]

I will never understand why Chinese textbooks (looking at you, BLCUP) teach that "nihao" means hello.  It does not.  You use it in two situations: the first time you meet someone, and to get someone's attention.  It is not a greeting, and honestly it makes me angry that it is taught as so, usually as the first dialog in the book.

 

At the factory whenever I would use 早 people would respond perfunctorily, as if it were technically correct but nobody used it much.  You're supposed to greet people with their name or nickname, problem with me is that I'm terrible with names in English, forget Chinese.  I don't think I've ever heard the full 早上好, unless it was me.

 

嗨 does sound pretty feminine.  I went for years and years before I heard my first 你吃了吗.  I'm certain it's a northern thing and as the textbooks are written up north, that it gets codified as "normal" when in fact it's a regional usage.  I've also heard 哈喽 as a greeting on wechat but as I'm a laowai perhaps that's expected.  One of my first "level-up" moments in learning Chinese was when I could actually hear people saying 拜拜 instead of bye-bye.  
 

[DavyJonesLocker]

54 minutes ago, vellocet said:

I will never understand why Chinese textbooks (looking at you, BLCUP) teach that "nihao" means hello.  It does not.

 

Yes, but the meaning is taken as a greeting in the same way as hello is a greeting. In English we can say "how are you" to mean hello. We don't expect an answer of "I am not feeling well today"  I take your point on the exactness of the translation

 

Many Chinese I know use 你好 when meeting strangers or someone not to familar. Everyone in my office says "hi" to each other

 

58 minutes ago, vellocet said:

One of my first "level-up" moments in learning Chinese was when I could actually hear people saying 拜拜 instead of bye-bye.  

 

I'd argue they are essentially saying bye bye as it's a loanword the nearest pinyin is baibai and as such the English is prevalent. Otherwise they would say 再见 

 

[Christa]

These are some really interesting responses.

 

Okay, let me ask a similar / related question. What would you say the most common:

 

1. Informal greeting would be?

2. Formal greeting would be?

 

I think the main reason I'm asking is because I just always say "hi" and this is the response I get back but I'm not sure if this is because I'm a foreigner or not.

[abcdefg]

I'm afraid that things like this are very "situational." No absolute answers will hold true.

[Christa]

13 hours ago, abcdefg said:

I'm afraid that things like this are very "situational." No absolute answers will hold true.

 

I completely agree. I'm just trying to get some feel for what other people say. What triggered me asking was that a friend of mine from the Mainland says he never uses "嗨" and I'm just wondering if that's the case for everyone and to find out what they're using. 

[vellocet]

Quote

I'd argue they are essentially saying bye bye as it's a loanword the nearest pinyin is baibai and as such the English is prevalent. Otherwise they would say 再见 

 

I mean, I could hear them say 拜拜.  They weren't saying bye-bye, they were saying the Chinese loan word.  It was a neat moment.

 

You greet people with their names.  That's pretty much it in my experience.  

[abcdefg]

8 hours ago, vellocet said:

You greet people with their names.  That's pretty much it in my experience.  

 

And if I cannot quickly recall the person's exact name, I will often use their title, such as “下午好老师”  or “早师傅。” Or as above, with just "老师“ plus a nod, or "师傅 "plus a nod. Furthermore at times I might use the surname alone, or modified slightly in a respectful way. 张 might become 张叔叔 for a man，or 张阿姨 for a woman. Or any of a thousand other possibilities.

 

Or if 张 is the bank manager and I'm applying for a loan, I would surely revert to 张先生。Unequal relationships like that have their own set of greeting rules, very different from family member and different from close friends, and different from casual friends, and different from strangers, and so on and on and on.

 

Sometimes using the person's full name as seen as overly stern, especially if an adult is addressing a teenager. “过来张天明” is often followed with a scold: "I've told you a hundred times to wear a hat and coat when it's cold outside." Whereas the given names only might be more appropriate if Mom is calling her son to sit and have a meal. "过来吃饭天明。“

 

And so on...It is an endless topic. The many, many answers are completely dependent on context, not only broad context, but subtleties of context. Any effort to "boil it down" to a simple formula winds up with artificial "textbook language" such as "你好“ and “你好吗？”

 

@Christa -- It might be a useful exercise to ask, "How do you usually greet people in English?" The answers will be many and diverse, and they will depend on a myriad of factors. 

 

What I did as a foreigner, was gradually acquire a broad repertory of Chinese greetings and responses to greetings. Then, over time, gradually refined my understanding of which ones would be most appropriate in which situations. This is part of acculturation. This is part of "thinking and talking in a native way." This is part of assimilation. It cannot happen over night. 

 

Not sure whether it would be an exaggeration to say that only a native speaker, someone native to that very place 当地人 can ever be able to get it "right" all the time.

 

The degree of "alien" flavor might be very subtle. I can visualize two people who have met on a bus in Guangzhou and struck up a chat and in the first 30 or 40 seconds they have unconsciously chosen ways to exchange greetings that revealed one person was originally from Shanxi and the other was originally from Jilin.

[Christa]

15 hours ago, abcdefg said:

@Christa -- It might be a useful exercise to ask, "How do you usually greet people in English?" The answers will be many and diverse, and they will depend on a myriad of factors. 

 

What I did as a foreigner, was gradually acquire a broad repertory of Chinese greetings and responses to greetings. Then, over time, gradually refined my understanding of which ones would be most appropriate in which situations. This is part of acculturation. This is part of "thinking and talking in a native way." This is part of assimilation. It cannot happen over night. 

 

Not sure whether it would be an exaggeration to say that only a native speaker, someone native to that very place 当地人 can ever be able to get it "right" all the time.

 

The degree of "alien" flavor might be very subtle. I can visualize two people who have met on a bus in Guangzhou and struck up a chat and in the first 30 or 40 seconds they have unconsciously chosen ways to exchange greetings that revealed one person was originally from Shanxi and the other was originally from Jilin.

 

That's a very interesting answer.

 

I suppose what is left of my question is this: Is it weird to greet friends / acquaintances in China with 嗨? Am I being strange / especially western in doing this? Or could this be considered fairly normal?

[abcdefg]

7 hours ago, Christa said:

I suppose what is left of my question is this: Is it weird to greet friends / acquaintances in China with 嗨? Am I being strange / especially western in doing this? Or could this be considered fairly normal?

 

I must apologize to you @Christa. I'm really not trying to discourage you in your quest to find the right way to say things. I'm only trying to show how much "it depends" enters the answer in such matters.

 

Let's take 嗨 an example (and I'm not 100% sure my illustration is even correct.) I'm using it to demonstrate a type of process one must mentally go through to address such a question. I'll pretend I'm writing a traditional, stodgy "speaking 口语" textbook for beginners.  Here's an excerpt from page 24 of that imaginary textbook.

 

Quote

 

 

I. About greetings

     A. Using 嗨

         1. 嗨 can be used as a greeting between two women who already know each other more intimately than being just acquaintances, more     likely as friends, when the speaker is between the ages of 15 and 30 and she is addressing a woman her junior by several years if she is near the top end of this age range. 

         2. An exception to that rule exists when two middle-aged women are clowning around in a friendly informal manner, much as two 50 or 60 year old men might address each other playfully as 小伙子 ( "lad or youngster") together with a jolly slap on the back.  

         3. Bear in mind that 嗨 is very rarely used as a greeting north of the Yangtze River even between young women who are friends, unless one of them is a foreigner. It is somewhat more common, however in and around Beijing, perhaps because of that city's international flavor.

         4.. And so on...

         5...

 

-------------------------------------------------------
 

7 hours ago, Christa said:

Is it weird to greet friends / acquaintances in China with 嗨?

 

To return to your original question and to try and give you a straight, if overly-simple answer, my personal opinion is that it is indeed mildly weird. Not hugely weird, however. There are degrees of "weird."

 

7 hours ago, Christa said:

Am I being strange / especially western in doing this?

 

Yes, that's a strange and/or foreign speech mannerism.

 

7 hours ago, Christa said:

Or could this be considered fairly normal?

 

No, it's not fairly normal.

 

[Christa]

11 minutes ago, abcdefg said:

7 hours ago, Christa said:

Is it weird to greet friends / acquaintances in China with 嗨?

 

To return to your original question and to try and give you a straight, if overly-simple answer, my personal opinion is that it is indeed mildly weird. Not hugely weird, however. There are degrees of "weird."

 

7 hours ago, Christa said:

Am I being strange / especially western in doing this?

 

Yes, that's a strange and/or foreign speech mannerism.

 

7 hours ago, Christa said:

Or could this be considered fairly normal?

 

No, it's not fairly normal.

 

Now this is super useful. You see, deep down, I suspected I was doing something a bit weird. Not something that was not done at all but something that was not typical. Mmmhhh, interesting...

[abcdefg]

@Christa -- I cannot swear that I'm right. It would be good to get several opinions, including some from native speakers. (I'm not a native speaker.)

 

Quote

You see, deep down, I suspected I was doing something a bit weird. Not something that was not done at all but something that was not typical.

 

I say and do all sorts of things that are a bit weird here in China and I seldom worry about them. If I think those weird things might give offense, then I am careful to correct them. But otherwise, not really so much.

 

I have to ask myself, "Oh, Gee, to you suppose if I say it this way they might realize I'm not really Chinese?" They already know from a hundred other rather broad clues. I don't set the bar for sounding like a native too high. After all, I'm not some undercover operator trying to pass as a native in order to accomplish my secret mission or to survive in hostile environs.

 

Gradually, over time, some of the rough corners wear away and I sound a little bit more natural. If local people who meet me think, "Yes, of course, he is foreign, but at least he's trying" that's enough and I will be pleased.

 

------------------------------

 

Let me add one simple suggestion as to how to sound more natural. (This is one of the things I do frequently, day to day.) I watch TV shows, both reporting and contemporary fiction, paying close attention to how things are phrased, how things are expressed. Then I go out and try them on the street to see if they actually work for me here and now.

 

If they work, then fine, mission accomplished. If not, it's back to the drawing board. "Did I pronounce it wrong? Was the context wrong?" and so on until the wrinkles are worked out. Sometimes I find I've done something stupid: Maybe inadvertently lifted a phrase seldom heard after the Tang Dynasty was over, and tried to use it on the street in Kunming, year 2017.

 

Then it's "Oops," delete that. And try again to say the same thing some other way.  I don't cry or beat myself up or become discouraged. Perfection is not required in order to succeed in this language business; but persistence is. Conversation is one of those "try and try again" things.