Can you travel in China without speaking Chinese?

Chinese cities are, in infrastructure terms, some of the easiest places on earth to move around. Every metro station, every ticket machine and every announcement is bilingual. Airports and high-speed rail stations signpost in English. Street signs carry pinyin. Hotels that accept foreign guests employ someone who can check you in.

Machine translation has also quietly solved the reading problem. Point a phone camera at a menu, a bus timetable or a medicine box and you get a usable answer in a second — and it works offline once you have downloaded the Chinese language pack, which you should do before you leave.

And Chinese people are, on the whole, extremely willing to help a visibly lost foreigner. A phone held up with an address on it produces pointing, walking-you-there, and occasionally an entire family conference about the best bus.

1. Payment — the big one

China went from cash straight to QR codes and skipped cards entirely. Your Visa card will be refused by a noodle shop, a temple ticket office, a market stall and most taxis. The fix takes twenty minutes at home: install Alipay or WeChat Pay and link your own bank card, which both have allowed foreign visitors to do since 2023. Do it before you fly — verification needs an SMS to your home number. Full detail: paying and mobile payment.

2. Taxis — a language problem with a non-language fix

Drivers speak no English, and place names are the hardest thing for a beginner to pronounce. But this is solved by showing rather than saying: have your destination in Chinese characters on your phone. Our address card tool makes one you can hand over, and taxis and ride-hailing covers the rest.

3. The internet you are used to

Google, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and most Western news sites are not reachable from mainland China. That matters more than it sounds, because Google Maps and Google Translate are exactly what you would otherwise reach for. Download offline maps and an offline translation pack in advance, and consider an international roaming plan or eSIM, which routes through your home carrier.

4. Menus without pictures

Plenty of restaurants have photo menus or a QR-code ordering page your phone can translate. Some have neither, and a wall of characters. Sixty characters make most of a menu readable, because dish names are built to a formula — see reading a Chinese menu, or play Menu Decoder for ten minutes and you will recognise the important ones.

About thirty phrases, and the ability to recognise perhaps ten things said back to you. That is a weekend, not a course — and the return is disproportionate, because the phrases you need are the same five or six every day.

Prioritise in this order: numbers (prices, platforms, room numbers), paying, taxis, ordering food, asking for help. Skip the self-introduction dialogue every textbook opens with — nobody at a ticket window wants to know where you are from.

One structural tip that matters more than any phrase: learn to recognise before you learn to produce. Being able to hear 扫码还是现金？ and know it means "QR or cash?" is worth more than being able to say ten sentences nobody asked you for. That is why every page in our travel phrasebook opens with what the other person says.

1. Set up Alipay or WeChat Pay with your own card, and test it.
2. Download offline maps and an offline Chinese translation pack.
3. Screenshot your hotel's name and address in Chinese — the single most useful image on your phone.
4. Sort connectivity: international roaming or an eSIM, so you are not dependent on hotel Wi-Fi.
5. Carry a few hundred yuan in small notes for the first day and for anywhere a scanner fails.
6. Write any allergies in Chinese and keep them on your phone — see pharmacy and emergencies.
7. Learn thirty phrases, or print them: our printable phrasebook does it in one sheet.

Do people speak English in China?

Not widely. It is common among younger people in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, and at international hotels and airports. Taxi drivers, market vendors, restaurant staff and railway staff generally speak none. Plan for no English and treat it as a bonus when it appears.

Is China safe for solo travellers?

Chinese cities have very low rates of street crime and are comfortable to walk around at night by most international standards. The practical risks on a trip are logistical rather than criminal: a taxi taking a long route, a scam tea house near a tourist site, or a payment method that stops working.

Is it rude to use a translation app in someone's face?

No. Phone-mediated communication is completely normal in China, where people use voice messages and QR codes for almost everything. Holding up a screen is read as practical, not rude.

What about Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore?

All three are considerably easier. English is widely spoken in Singapore and Hong Kong, cards work normally in all three, and the internet is unrestricted. Taiwan uses traditional characters — our converter handles that — and Hong Kong's everyday language is Cantonese rather than Mandarin.