Help!!!did I Offend Chinese People?
 

here's the story:i was dressed with the costume of geisha when there was halloween in my country(Greece) so since here there are a lot of chinese people who usually own stores with clothes me and my friends went to a chinese store and bowed saing nihao(that is hello in chinese language) they all smiled but come to think of that afte leaving the store i was wondering if i offended them since i dressed like a geisha (japanese woman ) and i hear that china is in bad terms with japan.maybe i am overthinking it or not.i really would like your opinion on this

Japan is not at war with China. I am sure they forgot about the moment you left the store.

Not all Chinese hate Japanese, so I think its over thinking it a bit.

My Chinese professor from last semester told us not to worry about offending Chinese people. They just appreciate you making the effort to communicate with them.

She's from Mainland China and didn't mind Japanese people at all, in fact she loves Japan.

It could be that the Chinese store owners didn't speak Mandarin at all. They could've usually spoken another dialect among themselves and they were awkward of listening Mandarin in a foreign place. Perhaps they typically spoke either Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, Shanghaiese, generic Min Nan (including Taiwanese), Taishanese, or Teochew.

If I know the meaning of "ni hao" i have a hard time believing a native Chinese person would not know the same meaning.

If you go down to the Guangdong province, they still don't like to use Standard Mandarin. There's a sociolinguistics term for this: covert prestige.

There are Chinese populations who do not encounter speeches in Standard Mandarin in their daily life: half of Chinese-Canadians, most of Chinese-Americans, Hong Kongers, Macanese, Chinese population in the Malay world except for Singapore, etc.

Really? I was under the impression that Chinese-Americans and Chinese-Canadians all spoke mandarin but wrote using traditional characters instead of simplified. Or perhaps I misinterpreted what you meant by this.

D'OHH.

Not every chinese person speaks/writes in chinese. Heck, I'm chinese and I'm CRAP at reading chinese. Don't matter if its simplified or traditional!

Chinese people migrate from all over china to all over the world and some are generation chinese, where they are born in canada/uk/america and have had a more canadian/british/american upbringing.

You are sort of mixing up with Taiwanese and oversea Chinese altogether.

Don't forget to notice "thousands" of Cantonese/Teochew/Taishanese speakers of Chinese in USA and Canada. Mandarin is only recently popular (as in since the 1990s) among North American Chinese.

Odds are they didn't understand you. Not to be insulting, but unless your accent is 100% spot-on, since they weren't expecting to hear you speak Chinese, they didn't understand it.

Alternatively, they understood you, but didn't speak Mandarin, so couldn't reply.

Nope. Until recently, the vast majority of overseas Chinese were from the southern part of China, and likely spoke Cantonese (or Fujian-ese). It is only recently, with the opening up of China, that any significant fraction of overseas Chinese speak Mandarin.