How to say it in Chinese

Necessary in Chinese

necessary · HSK 5

必需 bì xū

  1. 必 bì certainly
  2. 需 xū to need

水是人们生活所必需的。 Water is essential to people's lives.

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Other ways to say necessary

More words with 必 or 需

How do you say necessary in Chinese?

Necessary 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.