An epic guide to months, days of the week, and years in Chinese

Thinking about scheduling your first meeting in Chinese, or perhaps making weekend plans with your new Chinese friends? Then you’ll need to know how to talk about dates in Chinese!

Speaking Chinese will open up your calendar to a whole host of events. Not only is it the second most spoken language in the world, but it’s also one of the best languages to learn for business. With over a billion speakers in China and tens of millions around the world, you’ll surely fill up your calendar quite easily as you start building new meaningful relationships.

However, before you do that, you need to make sure you can actually schedule the first date or meeting. That’s why knowing how to talk about dates in Chinese will enhance your general experience with the Chinese language so significantly. Now, you’ll be able to make plans with your coworkers, classmates, and new friends. Once you’ve established relationships with Chinese speakers, you’ll be able to drastically increase the amount of time you spend practicing outside of class!

Plus, as anyone who’s been learning Chinese for any amount of time will know, studying this amazing language can help us see the world from a different perspective. For example, you’re probably used to writing dates in the month-day-year format if you’re a native English speaker. However, in Chinese, dates are written in the year-month-day format. In other words, they go from largest to smallest units!

Besides that, talking about dates in Chinese isn’t that different from English. All you need is some Chinese calendar vocabulary words, and a few more tips, and you’ll be set. One hugely important prerequisite skill, though, is knowing how to count in Chinese. If you’re not there yet, then we strongly recommend you take a pause and check out our helpful beginner’s guide to counting Chinese numbers.

So, if you’ve got your numbers down and are ready to start making appointments, let’s get right into the key vocabulary.

Key vocabulary: How to say months, years, and days

Let’s start by covering the building blocks of dates in Chinese: years, months, and days. As you’ll see later on, there are multiple ways to talk about days, but, for now, let’s focus on the essentials:

How to talk about years in Chinese

One of the biggest differences between talking about years in Chinese and English is that you always have to include the word 年 (year) when mentioning a specific year. English usually omits the word year except for ambiguous circumstances, like “the year 2000” or “the year 32 BCE.” In Chinese, you must add the word year (年) every single time.

Next, different languages use different systems for reading out years. English breaks down four-digit years into two two-digit numbers: 1987 becomes 19-87 (nineteen eighty-seven). Languages like Spanish and French opt to simply read out the full number. Chinese, however, reads each number individually. That makes 1987 simply one-nine-eight-seven. And, of course, we can’t forget the (年) at the end, so that makes it 一九八七年 (one-nine-eight-seven-nián). It’s that easy!

Here are a few more examples of how to read Chinese years:

How to talk about months in Chinese

Most of our everyday conversations generally revolve around the present and the immediate past or future. As such, we don’t always need to mention the year when we’re talking about our plans for the summer or what we’ve been up to. You can simply mention the month by itself if the context makes it clear that you’re talking about a specific month.

The months in Chinese are extremely easy to learn. The names of the months in English come from the Gregorian Calendar, and each represents a different Roman leader, god, festival, or number. Chinese, however, uses simple arithmetic to come up with the names for the months. All you need to do is add the word for month, 月 (yuè) immediately after a number 1-to-12. As a fun fact, the word 月 (yuè) used to mean “moon,” making it even easier to remember the word for months if you learn that association! Doesn’t the character look like a waxing crescent moon?

So, January is simply 一月 (yī yuè), which translates directly into “month one.” If you’re wondering how to talk about numbers in terms of quantity, you can do that easily with the Chinese measure word 个 (ge). So, if you want to say that something took you three months to complete, you can say 三个月 (sān ge yuè).

Here are the twelve months of the year in Chinese:

How to talk about days in Chinese

Chinese uses three different words to talk about days: 日 (rì), 号 (hào), and 天 (tiān). Only the first two are used when talking about dates, so let’s focus on those for now. Similarly to the months in Chinese, you just have to add the character for day (or, in this case, one of the two) after a number to turn it into a specific day. For example, 十二日 is the 12th day of the month. While English uses ordinal numbers (first, second, third) for days of the month, Chinese always uses cardinal numbers (one, two, three).

So, how do you know whether to use 日 (rì) or 号 (hào) when talking about days in Chinese? In general, 日 (rì) is more formal than 号 (hào). As such, you’ll tend to see 日 (rì) in written Chinese and 号 (hào) in most spoken interactions, except for formal ones.

Finally, 天 (tiān) is used as a quantifier of days. Use this when you want to talk about a time period in terms of days, such as 三天后见 (sān tiān hòu jiàn), “see you in three days.” You can also use 天 (tiān) to talk about today, tomorrow, and yesterday, though we’ll cover that in the following section.

Here’s how to talk about the 31 days of the month in Chinese.

Days of the week in Chinese

Next, we have the days of the week in Chinese. Though these aren’t included when talking about dates, they’re still very useful ways of making plans for the immediate future. There are three ways of talking about the days of the week in Chinese: 周 (zhōu), 星期 (xīng qī), and 礼拜 (lǐ bài). Of the three, 周 (zhōu) and 星期 (xīng qī) are the most common, being suitable for both formal and informal conversations. On the other hand, 礼拜 (lǐ bài) is informal and much less common, often used in spoken language.

Unlike years, months, and days, the days of the week have the number placed after the word for the day of the week. So, simply follow these formulas when you want to use any of the three ways to talk about the days of the week in Chinese:

• 周[X]
• 星期[X]
• 礼拜[X]

Just replace the X with the number of the corresponding day of the week, with one being Monday, two being Tuesday, and so on. The only exception to this rule is Sunday, which uses either 日 (rì) or 天 (tiān) instead of the corresponding seven, such as 星期天 (xīng qī tiān).

Here are all the different ways to say the days of the week in Chinese:

Other words related to dates in Chinese

Finally, there are many other auxiliary words that help us easily navigate the calendar in everyday conversations. Most of the time, we don’t really need to know the exact date for a particular event. For example, when asking a coworker out for coffee, a simple “Does tomorrow work?” should do the trick. Here are some helpful words related to date in Chinese.

Important holidays in Chinese

As you likely already know, Chinese culture has many unique festivals and holidays. What’s special about them is that they rely on the Chinese calendar, which means that their actual dates on the Gregorian calendar vary year by year. For example, the Western New Year always falls on January 1st, but the Chinese New Year falls somewhere between late January and mid-February.

Here are some of the most common Chinese and Western holidays in Chinese. For the Chinese holidays that use the Chinese calendar, we’ve entered their corresponding dates for 2023.

Fun facts about the Chinese calendar

What is the zodiac Chinese calendar?

The Chinese zodiac is made up of a cycle of 12 zodiacs that are represented by a different animal. Each year becomes the year of an animal, such as “the year of the rabbit.” Everyone born during this year will become that zodiac, as opposed to the West where zodiacs vary from month to month.

The 12 animals of the zodiac are:

• 鼠 (shǔ) - Rat
• 牛 (niú) - Ox
• 虎 (hǔ) - Tiger
• 兔 (tù) - Rabbit
• 龙 (lóng) - Dragon
• 蛇 (shé) - Snake
• 马 (mǎ) - Horse
• 羊 (yáng) - Goat
• 猴 (hóu) - Monkey
• 鸡 (jī) - Rooster
• 狗 (gǒu) - Dog
• 猪 (zhū) - Pig

Each of the twelve zodiacs, or animals, interact differently with each other. So, once you know your Chinese zodiac, you’ll want to check every year how your sign interacts with the current year. For example, the year of the rabbit will have a different impact on horse and dragon signs. In general, your zodiac year brings nothing but bad news and poor fortune, so watch out around your 12th, 24th, 36th, etc. birthdays!

What is the biggest holiday in China?

Chinese New Year is by far the largest holiday in China, with hundreds of millions of people traveling across the country to be with their families. In fact, it’s such a massive holiday that the travel rush period has its own name — 春运 (chūn yùn). In 2019, over 421 million passengers traveled by rail, air, and road in mainland China alone for Chinese New Year, showing just how important this holiday is in China.

How to calculate Chinese New Year

The Chinese New Year is calculated according to the Chinese calendar. As opposed to the Gregorian calendar, which is a solar calendar, the Chinese calendar uses the moon to calculate the days and months of the year. This means that a new month begins the day a new moon rises.

To keep track of when the Chinese New Year is in a given year, you’ll have to keep track of the lunar cycle for a long period of time. That’s because Chinese years have anywhere from 353 to 385 days, depending on moon cycles and whether or not you’re dealing with a leap year.

The easiest way to check for the date of the Chinese New Year is to simply look it up. Here are the dates for the following ten years:

• 2024: February 10
• 2025: January 29
• 2026: February 17
• 2027: February 6
• 2028: January 26
• 2029: February 13
• 2030: February 3
• 2031: January 23
• 2032: February 11
• 2033: January 31

The Legend of Nian

If you’re wondering about the origins of the Chinese New Year, you’ll surely want to listen to the Legend of Nian. According to this legend, there used to be a giant monster with fangs that came out of the bottom of the sea at the end of the year to hunt for food and people. The terrified villagers called this beast Nian and escaped to the tops of mountains every New Year to avoid its deadly attacks.

All that changed when a strange old man showed up right when the entire village was getting ready to flee to the mountains. An old lady tried to convince the old man to flee with them, but he refused. In fact, the old man asked to be allowed to stay in this old lady’s house for the night. In exchange, he would expel Nian from the town.

The old lady wasn’t convinced, but, seeing that she wasn’t going to change the old man’s mind, reluctantly agreed to let him stay while she fled for the mountains. Later that night, Nian made its way into town and found complete darkness as the town was devoid of villagers — except for one house. Nian went to the one house with the lights on and found that every wall and door in the house was covered in red paper.

By this point, Nian was getting more and more frightened as it started seeing more red paper and candles inside the house. Suddenly, a large noise went off that startled Nian, and at that exact moment, the old man jumped out roaring in a red gown. This finally scared Nian enough to flee back into the ocean, leaving the town fully intact.

The next morning, the villagers came back to find that their town was in pristine condition. The old lady was happily surprised that the old man had kept his promise and, better yet, that they now had a way to defend themselves from Nian. Thanks to the wisdom of this strange old man, the villagers now knew that bright lights, the color red, and loud noises could scare Nian away.

That’s why Chinese new year celebrations today involve firecrackers, countless iterations of the color red, and no shortage of bright lights and loud noises. There’s even a demonstration of Nian chasing through the villagers and running away in sheer terror as the firecrackers start to go off!

Time to get booked and busy thanks to this Chinese calendar vocab

There you have it! Now you know 121 words related to dates in Chinese that will allow you to book important meetings and fun soirees with your friends and colleagues. Now you’ve got no excuse to take your Chinese to the next level by making plans to chat outside of the classroom and practice even when you’re not studying.

If you enjoyed this elementary Mandarin Chinese guide, make sure to check out the rest of our free content in our Mandarin Chinese blog. We regularly upload easy-to-digest and beginner-friendly guides to help you casually improve your Chinese language skills. For example, check out our guide to all 214 Chinese radicals and our beginner’s guide to pinyin!