Months in Chinese: yīyuè to shí'èryuè with pinyin and date writing

One-month to twelve-month: how the Chinese months are named

Chinese gives the Gregorian months no names at all, only numbers. The word yuè means both moon and month, Wiktionary notes, and the months are formed by putting the numbers one to twelve in front of it. Anyone who knows the numbers in Chinese can say every month, and the numbers page covers all twelve. The months therefore carry the tones of their numbers: yī high, èr falling, sān high, sì falling, wǔ low, and the yuè after them is always falling.

Writing has two styles. Unicode CLDR, the locale data that phones and computers read, spells out the month in characters for simplified Chinese and prints Arabic digits with yuè for traditional Chinese. Both forms are correct in both scripts and read aloud the same way.

The month names on this page match the months of the year table, where Chinese stands beside Japanese and Korean. The table shows that Japanese and Korean also count their months with numbers, while the European languages give each month a name inherited from Latin.

March or three months: the measure word that changes the meaning

Learners mix up two expressions that differ by one syllable. Sānyuè is March, the third month. A period of three months needs the measure word gè between the number and yuè: sān gè yuè, written with the simplified or traditional form of the classifier. Wiktionary lists that character as the classifier for months and gives jiǔ gè yuè, nine months, as its example.

The same logic applies to which month. Asking in which month uses jǐ, how many, in the place of the number: jǐ yuè? The general word for month as a unit of the calendar is yuèfèn, which Wiktionary also records.

Year, month, day: reading Chinese dates aloud

English Wikipedia's article on date notation in China describes the order as big-endian, the same as ISO 8601: year first, month next, day last. The characters for year, month and day often act as separators between the numbers, so a date can be read without knowing any rule about which number comes where.

The year is read digit by digit. The same article gives 2006 as èr líng líng liù, two-zero-zero-six, and when the year is written in characters the zero takes the circle form: èr líng èr liù for 2026, as in the table above. The CLDR spelling rules for Chinese years produce the same digit-by-digit form and write the zero as a small circle in place of the ordinary character líng.

For the day, hào and rì are both correct. The article explains that hào is the colloquial word, heard in speech and from news presenters, while rì belongs to formal writing. In speech the unit can even disappear after a day above ten, so a speaker may say the 29th of January without hào, but not the 9th.

Taiwan adds a second year count. Official documents there number years from the founding of the Republic of China in 1912, so 2006 is the 95th year of the Republic, and the Gregorian year is written out in full to avoid confusion.

The months of the Chinese lunar calendar

The traditional Chinese calendar is lunisolar, and its months begin at the new moon. English Wikipedia's article on the calendar explains that most months are simply numbered, like the Gregorian ones, but the first month of the lunar year is zhēngyuè, the capital month, and the last is làyuè, the sacrificial month. About once every three years a leap month, rùnyuè, is added to keep the calendar in step with the seasons.

Unicode CLDR uses these names when software shows a date in the Chinese calendar: the eleventh month, then làyuè, then zhēngyuè. Chinese New Year, the first day of zhēngyuè, falls on the new moon between 21 January and 20 February, according to English Wikipedia's article on the festival.