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What are you supposed to say when Chinese pay you compliments?


Brandon263

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When someone says something like "Your Chinese is good," I often find it hard to respond. I usually end up saying "meiyou" and shaking my head in modesty, but I have a feeling that this is the incorrect response. "Nali nali" feels dated and just plain weird, while "Xie xie" doesn't have the proper qian xu element. What is the correct (i.e. modest and gracious) way to respond to compliments?

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I just kind of joke around and "say not as good as yours!" or "far from it!" I know some people are saying "xie xie" these days and it's gotten somewhat more acceptable in the last decade. Chinese language teachers used to go crazy if you tried to say "xie xie" to a compliment but not as much in the past several years.

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Once or twice I've told people who are being complimentary to the point of being tiresome that they're 太见外了吧. I like to think this is kind of 'you're too polite. No, really, you're too polite. Stop it now please.' But I could be wrong.

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Wah, 班门弄斧 shows serious chengyu skills. (It is a chengyu right?) I might not be able to pull that or 太见外了吧 off since I'm only at intermediate/lower-advanced level. What does 太见外 mean?

I agree with Meng Lelan that 889's mei shenme hao sounds great, though. Is meiyou wrong, though?

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I usually just say 哪里 哪里. It seems to be one of the phrases that all chinese people say allegedly (like 你吃了吗? as a greeting) when in reality it seems hardly anyone says it, but it usually gets a few chuckles so it serves as a good response anyway.

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"BTW, 没什么好 sounds weird; no native speaker would say that."

The point is to stop the compliments, not encourage them.

I know your point, but it’s just weird. All these modest expressions are not intended to encourage further compliments, but to show you’re a modest person. And unless one’s Chinese is really, really good, in almost all cases, people will stop there, or they may add 你谦虚了, something like that。

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I always say meiyou meiyou, in fact its just an automatic response now. One time I was telling someone I studied at Zhejiang University, they proceeded to say it's a good university, naturally I thought they were going to compliment me so I automatically said meiyou meiyou. Felt really bad after that, but explained the reason why I said meiyou right after.

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Yeah, now I mostly go with:

"没有,没有那么好." Which sounds pretty ordinary.

I used to say: "还是有缺点." Which is that modest way of deflecting a comment, but also signaling it's pretty good since 'quedian' is a more formal way of saying faults. That felt kinda lame after a while though, and it of course illicited more attention.

As far as 哪里,哪里 goes, I like the longer form I've heard: "哪里,哪里有xx," xx being what they're complimenting you on.

A sort of joke response for compliments I've picked up from young friends is "必需的,必需的."

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I love 还差得远呢. In the old version of Practical Chinese Reader, this is what Gubo uses and I don't think it's gone out of date. Always seems nicely modest. Also, I might be wrong, but is KennyWoo the only native speaker who has replied? Might be best to go with his suggestions...

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