How to Say Hello in French: Bonjour and the Rule Tourists Break

Hello in French is Bonjour▶, pronounced bon-ZHOOR, and there is no situation in France where it is the wrong choice. But the word matters less than the rule attached to it: in France, bonjour is not a pleasantry, it is a social obligation. You say it when you enter a bakery, a lift, a doctor's waiting room, a small shop. Skip it and ask your question directly, and you will be read as rude, not as foreign. Most of the "the French are cold" stories come from tourists who never said bonjour first. This guide covers the greetings, the rule, and the sounds.

The Essential French Greetings

Two things worth noticing. Ça va ?▶ is the swiss army knife of French: it is a greeting, a question, and an answer. Ça va ? Ça va. is a complete, entirely normal exchange. And Salut▶, like the Italian ciao, works coming and going, but it is strictly for people you would call tu. Saying salut to a shopkeeper is the fastest way to sound like you learned French from an app and never used it.

The Bonjour Rule

This is the part that changes how France treats you.

• Entering any shop: bonjour to the room before anything else. Then your question.
• A lift, a waiting room, a small hotel breakfast: bonjour to whoever is there. Silence is the rude option.
• Once per person, per day. French speakers do not say bonjour twice to the same person. If you already greeted a colleague this morning, the second encounter gets re or nothing at all. Saying bonjour again invites a gentle on s'est déjà vu, "we've already seen each other".
• After dark, it becomes Bonsoir▶, and the same obligation applies.

The underlying logic: in French, you acknowledge the person before you use them. Asking "where is the bread?" without a bonjour treats a human being as a vending machine. Add the word and the same person becomes helpful. It is one word and it is the highest-leverage word in the language.

Tu or Vous? The Choice Behind the Greeting

Bonjour is neutral, which makes it safe. What follows is not:

• Comment vas-tu ?▶ or Ça va ?▶ with tu: friends, family, colleagues your age, children.
• Comment allez-vous ?▶ with vous: strangers, elders, officials, any professional setting, anyone you have not been invited to tutoyer.

Default to vous with any adult stranger. French speakers make the switch explicit: on peut se tutoyer, "we can use tu". Wait for the invitation. Getting this wrong is a real, if small, social error, and unlike a mispronounced vowel, native speakers do notice.

Note that Ça va ? straddles the line. It is casual, but it is so common that it passes almost anywhere once the bonjour has been said.

Pronunciation: What the Spelling Hides

Three details do most of the work.

Nasal vowels have no English equivalent. The on in bonjour is not "on". The air goes through your nose and the "n" is never actually pronounced as a consonant. Bonjour is roughly bõ-ZHOOR, with the first syllable humming rather than closing.

The French r is not an English r. It is made at the back of the throat, close to gargling, nearer to the ch in Scottish "loch" than to the r in "road". It appears in bonjour, bonsoir, au revoir: three of your five most-used words.

The stress is even, and lands at the end. English speakers hammer the first syllable of everything. French gives each syllable roughly equal weight and lets the phrase rise slightly at the end. BON-jour sounds foreign; bon-ZHOOR sounds French.

This is exactly where written guides run out of road. No respelling of bonjour on a page contains a nasal vowel or a uvular r, because English has neither, and reading transliterations quietly trains the wrong habits. The only fix is to hear a native say the whole phrase, then say it back out loud, several times, until your mouth stops resisting. That listen and repeat loop is called shadowing, and it is the fastest way to turn a phrase you recognise into one you can produce under pressure. It is how the Hyperpolyglot app handles every phrase: real sentences, native audio, looped until they come out automatically. Available on iOS, Android, and Web.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

1. Not saying bonjour at all. The single biggest one. It is not politeness, it is entry.
2. Using salut with a stranger. It is tu territory. With a shopkeeper it lands as over-familiar.
3. Saying bonne nuit as a greeting. It means "sleep well". Arriving at a dinner at 9 pm, say bonsoir.
4. Saying bonjour twice to the same person. Once per day. The second time, French speakers say re or just smile.
5. Saying allô in person. It is exclusively a phone word, exactly like the Chinese wéi.

Bonus: How to Say Goodbye in French

• Au revoir▶ (o-re-VWAHR), the universal goodbye, correct with absolutely anyone.
• Salut▶, which closes a conversation with friends just as it opened it.
• À bientôt▶ (a byen-TOH), "see you soon", and À demain▶ (a de-MAN), "see you tomorrow".
• Bonne journée▶ (bon zhoor-NAY), "have a good day", what you say leaving a shop. The evening version is Bonne soirée▶.
• Bonne nuit▶, only when someone is genuinely going to bed.

Leaving a shop, the full native combo is merci, bonne journée, au revoir. Learn bonjour, bonsoir, ça va, au revoir and bonne journée with real audio, drill them until they are reflexes rather than translations, and France will feel like a noticeably warmer country.

Keep Reading

• Language Islands -- the real-sentence method that turns greetings into actual conversations
• The Easiest Languages to Learn -- where French sits for English speakers
• The Shadowing Technique -- how to drill pronunciation until it becomes automatic