Search for how to prepare for a trip to China and you get lists: "100 Chinese words every traveller needs". They are not wrong, exactly. They are just the wrong shape for the problem.
A traveller does not need a hundred nouns. They need to complete perhaps twenty transactions — get from the airport, check in, order, pay, ask where something is — and each transaction is a short sequence with a beginning and an end. This article covers the four sequences that matter most, what you need to recognise as opposed to say, and a four-week plan that fits around a job.
Why word lists fail travellers
Knowing 票 (ticket), 酒店 (hotel), 多少 (how much) is genuinely useful. But standing at a counter you do not need the word — you need the whole move:
Four complete moves beat forty isolated nouns, because a move can be executed and a noun cannot.
The four sequences that cover most of a trip
1. Airport and transport
The highest-stakes sequence, because it happens when you are tired and carrying luggage. Prepare: asking where something is, buying a ticket, confirming the destination, asking how long, and telling a driver where to go.
2. Hotel
Short and highly scripted, which makes it the easiest to prepare. Checking in, confirming the booking, asking about breakfast and wifi, reporting a problem, checking out.
3. Restaurants
The sequence you will repeat most often, two or three times a day. Ask for a recommendation, check whether it suits you, state a restriction, ask for the bill. If you prepare only one sequence, prepare this one.
4. Shopping and payment
Prices, sizes, "I'm just looking", and the payment question — which in China usually means confirming whether a foreign card works, or whether cash is accepted at all.
Mobile payment dominates day-to-day transactions in China. Sort out how you will pay before departure, and learn the one sentence you need if it fails: 可以刷卡吗？ ("Can I pay by card?") or 可以用现金吗？ ("Can I pay cash?").
What you need to understand, not say
This is the half travellers skip, and it is where trips actually go wrong. You will not need to produce these — you will need to catch them instantly:
- 往左 / 往右 / 一直走 — left / right / straight on, always delivered with a pointing hand
- 多少人？ — how many people (asked the moment you enter a restaurant)
- 要辣吗？ — do you want it spicy
- 扫码 / 二维码 — scan the code / QR code
- 护照 — passport, at every hotel check-in
- 没有了 — we're out of it
Recognition is much cheaper to build than production. Twenty minutes of listening practice on this list is worth more than another fifty vocabulary items.
Four weeks before departure
Fifteen to twenty minutes a day, assuming you start from nothing:
- Week 1 — Pronunciation and numbers. Numbers matter more than anything else on this list: prices, room numbers, platform numbers, times, phone numbers. Add 你好 / 谢谢 / 不好意思.
- Week 2 — Restaurant sequence, end to end, plus the recognition list above.
- Week 3 — Transport and directions, including the pointing-hand vocabulary. Practise asking, then practise not understanding the answer and recovering.
- Week 4 — Hotel and shopping. Then run all four sequences once more without notes.
That is roughly seven hours of study, and it changes a two-week trip more than any other seven hours you could spend preparing.
What to keep on your phone
Preparation is not the same as coverage. Keep three things accessible offline: your accommodation address in Chinese characters, any dietary restriction written in Chinese, and a translation app that works without signal. Learning removes friction; it does not remove the need for a fallback.