Essential in Chinese
essential · HSK 5
必需
- 必 certainly
- 需 to need
水是人们生活所必需的。 Water is essential to people's lives.
Other ways to say essential
More words with 必 or 需
How do you say essential in Chinese?
Essential in Chinese is 必需 (bì xū). You can also say 必要 (bì yào).
Which word should I use?
Start with the first one: it is the easiest on the HSK list. The others say it too, often in a more formal way or for a narrower sense; each one’s page has real sentences that show how it is used.
Where do these words come from?
Our own dictionary’s meanings for the official HSK word list. A word is shown for an English word when that is one of its first meanings; the easiest word whose first meaning it is comes first.
More free tools
Greetings: hello, good morning and goodbye. Measure words: the classifier for any noun. Tone practice: say a word and see your tones. Read any Mandarin: point at a word for its meaning.
Meanings from our own dictionary. Chinese often has more than one way to say a word.