{"id":181469,"date":"2019-04-29T04:58:24","date_gmt":"2019-04-29T08:58:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fluentu.com\/blog\/learn\/chinese-conversation-script\/"},"modified":"2025-06-29T07:48:28","modified_gmt":"2025-06-29T11:48:28","slug":"chinese-conversation-script","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fluentu.com\/blog\/chinese\/chinese-conversation-script\/","title":{"rendered":"9 Chinese Conversation Scripts to Prepare You for Real-world Dialogues"},"content":{"rendered":"

Textbook Chinese dialogues are the worst. It doesn’t matter how many times you read through the conversations\u2014once you go to a restaurant in China<\/a>, you’ll likely be thrown for a loop within a sentence or two.<\/p>\n

That’s because we can’t predict exactly what someone will say in any given situation.<\/p>\n

Think of the Chinese dialogues in this post as guides<\/strong>\u2014these nine scripts will give you a sense of conversational flow and the kind of questions and responses you might run into in the real world to help prevent you from freezing up.<\/p>\n

[fluentu-toc]
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Chinese Conversation Openers<\/h2>\n

Before you start any<\/em> conversation, you want to make sure that approaching someone in Chinese will not be offensive. People of other Asian nationalities probably won’t appreciate you assuming they’re Chinese.<\/p>\n

If you aren’t sure whether the other person is Chinese or not, you can say “Hello” in English along with your \u4f60\u597d (n\u01d0 h\u01ceo)<\/em>.<\/strong> Saying \u4f60\u597d will work for you because you’re foreign, though it’s generally not how Chinese people greet each other<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you can confirm that someone is Chinese before you start a conversation with them (for example, if you overhear them speaking Chinese), then you can skip the \u4f60\u597d greeting altogether.<\/p>\n

In that case, a much more natural way to start a conversation in Chinese is to state the obvious.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s like the way an English speaker might use a rhetorical question, like asking a colleague, “Hey, done with lunch?”\u2014even though it’s clear that the colleague has already finished eating and gone back to work.<\/p>\n

So in Chinese, you can try out these neutral conversation starter statements with a friend, a colleague, an acquaintance, your boss or even a stranger!<\/p>\n