How to Say "I Love You" in Cantonese: 我愛你 vs 我鍾意你 (ngo5 oi3 nei5)

So you want to learn how to say "I love you" in Cantonese.

Maybe you're dating someone from Hong Kong. Maybe you're watching a Cantonese drama and you keep hearing romantic phrases you can't quite catch. Or maybe you just want to tell someone special how you feel—in their language.

Here's the thing: if you google this and memorize 我愛你 (ngo5 oi3 nei5), you're technically correct. That's the direct translation. But if you actually use it the way English speakers throw around "I love you," you're going to sound... weird. Not wrong, exactly. Just off. Like someone who learned English from a very formal textbook and goes around saying "I wish to purchase sustenance" instead of "I'm hungry."

Let me explain what's actually going on.

The Direct Translation: 我愛你 (ngo5 oi3 nei5)

The characters break down simply enough:

The numbers after each syllable are tones—Cantonese has six of them, which we'll get to in a minute.

But here's what nobody tells you upfront: Cantonese speakers almost never say 我愛你 verbally. It's too formal. Too intense. It's the kind of phrase Chinese people might say in wedding vows or during a major life confession—not on a regular Tuesday.

Using 我愛你 casually is like proposing marriage when you meant to suggest getting coffee.

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What Cantonese Speakers Actually Say: 我鍾意你 (ngo5 zung1 ji3 nei5)

The real way to express your feelings in everyday Cantonese is 我鍾意你 (ngo5 zung1 ji3 nei5).

Literally? It translates to "I like you."

Functionally? It's how you say "I love you" in actual romantic contexts. It's what you use when you're dating someone, when you want to confess your strong feelings, when you're in the early stages of a relationship.

The word 鍾意 (zung1 ji3) conveys real affection without the weight of 愛 (oi3). You can also use it for things you like—我鍾意食蛋撻 means "I like egg tarts"—but when you say it to someone in a romantic context, everybody knows what you mean.

This trips up a lot of language learners because in English, "I like you" and "I love you" carry very different weights. In Cantonese, expressions like 我鍾意你 do the heavy lifting that 我愛你 does for us—it's your go-to for everyday love.

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Cantonese Love Phrases Beyond the Basics

If you want to learn Cantonese romantic phrases that actually sound natural, here are some that work:

Intensified expressions:

Indirect ways to express love:

These indirect expressions are huge in Cantonese culture. If you're not comfortable with super direct declarations, saying you miss someone or that they mean a lot to you is a perfectly valid—and often more culturally appropriate—way to express affection.

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Cantonese Terms of Endearment

Here's what people actually call their partners:

Fun fact: Hong Kong couples often call each other 老公/老婆 even before they're married. It's similar to how English speakers might jokingly say "hubby" or "wifey" for a boyfriend or girlfriend.

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How to Pronounce These Phrases

Cantonese is a tonal language with six primary tones. If you've dealt with Mandarin tones before, brace yourself—Cantonese has more, and the differences between some of them are subtle.

The numbers you see (ngo5, oi3, nei5) indicate which tone to use:

For 我愛你 (ngo5 oi3 nei5):

For 我鍾意你 (ngo5 zung1 ji3 nei5):

If you mess up the tones, you won't accidentally insult someone's mother or anything dramatic. But native speakers might genuinely not understand what you're trying to say. This is why learning from actual Cantonese content—not just a vocabulary list—matters so much.

The romanization system you'll see most often is Jyutping, developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong in 1993. It's the academic standard and what most serious Cantonese resources use.

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Why Cantonese Culture Handles Love Differently

Here's something important if you want to actually connect with Cantonese speakers: expressing love verbally is way more reserved in Chinese culture than in Western cultures.

Older Chinese people especially? They basically never say "I love you" out loud. They show affection through actions—cooking for you, taking care of you when you're sick, spending time with you. Words are considered less important than what you do.

Younger generations, influenced by Western media, are getting more comfortable with verbal declarations. But even among younger speakers in Hong Kong, you'll hear 我鍾意你 far more often than 我愛你.

This is pretty different from how it works in Mandarin, by the way. Mandarin speakers (especially in written contexts) use 我爱你 (wǒ ài nǐ) more readily. Cantonese speakers are just more colloquial and subtle about the whole thing.

Between family members—parents and children, siblings—the word 愛 is rarely spoken at all. Love gets expressed through care, through subtle verbal affirmations, through showing up. If you're learning Cantonese to communicate with family, understanding this cultural context is as important as the phrases themselves.

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The Problem with Just Memorizing Phrases

Look, you can write down 我鍾意你 right now and practice saying it. That's fine for a start.

But here's the reality: if you want to actually speak Cantonese in real conversations—romantic or otherwise—you need to learn from real content. Shows, movies, YouTube videos, podcasts. Stuff where you hear these phrases in context, where you pick up on the subtle differences between formal and casual expressions, where you start to internalize what tone 3 sounds like without having to consciously think about it.

We've talked about whether Cantonese is a language or dialect before—spoiler, it's definitely its own thing—and the same principles apply here. You can't learn a language like a native speaker from flashcards alone. Flashcards vocabulary lists word bank word of the day cantonese dictionary 100 most common words 2000 most common words cantonese key phrases... that stuff helps, but it's not enough.

If you're interested in how love is expressed across Chinese languages more broadly, including Mandarin expressions, we've covered that too.

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Learning Cantonese Love Phrases That Actually Stick

The expressions covered here—我鍾意你, 我掛住你, the terms of endearment—they're all things you'll hear constantly in Cantonese dramas, movies, and everyday conversation in Hong Kong. But reading about them and actually being able to use them naturally are two different things.

Migaku is built specifically for this kind of learning. You can learn Chinese (including Cantonese) by watching actual shows and videos—content where people use expressions like 我鍾意你 in real romantic scenes, not sterile textbook examples. The browser extension lets you look up words instantly and add them to your spaced repetition deck, so you're learning vocabulary in context instead of from isolated lists.

When you learn 我鍾意你 from an actual scene where someone confesses their feelings to the special person in their life, you remember it differently. You know the tone. You know the context. You know when it's appropriate versus when it would sound weird.

The mobile app syncs everything, so you can review on your commute or whenever you've got a few minutes. And because every word comes from content you actually care about, it sticks. There's a 10-day free trial if you want to check it out.