Chinese New Year wishes and greetings 2025

The Lunar New Year is right around the corner and will see many of Manchester's Chinese diaspora celebrate over the coming weeks.

The streets of Manchester are likely to be lit up with bright lights, fireworks, and elegant decorations alongside a series of events set to take place on Wednesday, January 29. A number of events are also expected to take place in Chinatown and the rest of Manchester for the Year of the Snake.

Otherwise known as the Spring Festival, the Chinese New Year is an ancient festival to welcome in a new year based on the traditional Chinese lunar calendar. While widely celebrated in China, communities across the world celebrate it in a variety of ways.

If you plan on attending a Chinese New Year parade in Manchester on the weekend of February 1 and 2, it might be worth brushing up on your Mandarin to help support any of your Chinese friends. For those who don't know, Mandarin is the standard form of, and the most widely spoken, Chinese language with over 730 million speakers.

However, despite its immense number of speakers, Mandarin is an incredibly difficult language to learn if your not a native speaker. But, we all have to start somewhere so why don't we start with an extremely common phrase.

The most simple is Happy New Year: 新年快乐 (xīn nián kuài lè). This is pronounced as shin nee-an kwai le .

Another common greeting is gong hei fat choy, but this doesn't literally mean Happy New Year. Instead you are delivering a wish for prosperity and that the recipient will have a wealthy year ahead.

You can also say Happy Spring Festival which is 春节快乐 (chūn jiē kuài lè) in Mandarin.

To generally greet someone formally in Mandarin, you would use the term 'ni hao' (pronounced 'knee' and 'how'). While this is