simplified Chinese: 你好; pinyin: nǐ hǎo

Hello!

This is a basic greeting in Chinese that is the easier way of saying hello in this language. It is pronounced as “nee haow.” While this is a common greeting, in Taiwan there tends to be a different way of saying it by adding “ma” to the end of the greeting. By adding this to the end of nǐ hǎo, you are expanding a simple greeting by making it more of a conversation starter because it would now translate to, “how are you?” instead of just hello. Another way the word can often be seen changed is when talking to elders, instead of just “ni” you’d add an additional “n” at the end to make the greeting a bit more formal. It is interesting to see how even a basic word like hello in the Chinese language can be modified so much for the target audiences.