How to tell time in Mandarin Chinese? Days, weeks, months, and years

In Mandarin Chinese, if you want to tell the time in terms of days, weeks, months, and years, you need to learn the words for them and a few simple grammatical structures. Suppose you tell your friend that you’ll meet her at the cinema (电影院 (transcribed diànyǐng yuàn, meaning “cinema”)) at a quarter past eight at night. Everything goes well, and you speak Mandarin Chinese wonderfully, except that you meant tomorrow, and your friend thought you meant tonight! That could be a problem. Let’s solve it! In this post, we will look at how to use the days of the week, months, years, nearby words (like “tomorrow” or “yesterday”), as well as some common uses of them, like asking “which year?” or saying when your birthday is.

First, let's learn the words for the near past and the near future:

Second, let’s learn the days of the week. The good news here is that it’s all just counting in Mandarin, at least until you get to Sunday.

Months are named in numerical order, just like weekdays. This time though, there’s no Sunday at the end to confuse things. It’s just months one through twelve, 一到十二 (transcribed yī dào shí èr)

Your time vocabulary is moving right along. You know how to tell the week, the month, and the year. We also have a post on how present, past, and future time are expressed in Mandarin. In the meantime, check out our list of essential dates, holidays, and eras in Chinese!

Ready to dive in?! Here are some exercises to practice the days, weeks, months, and years in Mandarin. Let's go!