The Chinese words listed above don't really form an honorific in the applied linguistic sense of "words tending to convey honour".

Above all other things, people have to realise that ALL languages have strategies and forms which are used to convey politeness, honour, etc. In Japanese, this has been part of the words themselves, due to a highly stratified society in the past. Chinese, lacking convenient morphemes to place honourific ideas, often move the honourific aspect into sentence forms, and the use of literary language, which has been separated from colloquial chinese (i.e. the form most people speak and learn today), for a good many centuries, or scholarly/formal language.

Politeness in Chinese language is often to use older and more abstracted language, and deference about opinion. The only real word changing forms in common use can be found in the use of pronouns, of which there are many.

To refer to you, the common word in Mandarin is "ni". The slightly more polite form is to use "nin", which has the same character + a character for heart. To enquire after something you possess (like a name), the formal practice is to use "gui", a word which means "precious", but is an classical form for the second person, although sometimes Hong Kong movie translators, being rather insensitive to these things, translate the sentences into things like "What is your most precious name?" Ditto for the use of "ben" to refer to yourself or your own things.


The words listed above, Xiaojie, Shifu, Laoshi, are all titles. They mean Miss, Master, and Teacher, and convey nothing about honour or politeness other than the fact that you are using them.

All of the terms listed above are in common use, and none can be called "old-fashioned", simply because all of them are used across the gamut of dialects and regional uses of Mandarin. I have always called my old neighbour: Lee taitai, Mrs. Lee, and official statements from the People's Republic always address Tongzhi-men, Comrades, which has also been used in other contexts; and I, along with the population of Guangdong, have always called waitresses Xiaojie.

Also, Xiansheng is a term of scholarly connotations, left over from the days when all scholars were of "gentle" birth. The title has the same characters as the Japanese word "sensei", their reading for those characters.