Months of the year in Chinese: 一月 to 十二月

The months of the year in Chinese have no names, only numbers: January is 一月 yīyuè, "one month", February is 二月 èryuè, "two month", and the count runs to December, 十二月 shí'èryuè, "twelve month". If you can count to twelve in Mandarin you already know all twelve; the only new word is 月 yuè, which means both "month" and "moon". The things that do need learning are around the names: "two months" is not 二月, a date runs year, month, day, and the traditional calendar has month names of its own. In Mandarin film and television subtitles, the months mentioned most are April and May, and the one mentioned least is December.

Updated 2 November 2026 · 9 min read

The twelve months

Every month is its number plus 月, so the table below is generated by that rule, not typed, and checked against known forms before it is printed:

The last column is how many times the month is named in characters per million words of Chinese subtitles, with the longer form 五月份 wǔyuèfèn (the same month, with 份 fèn added) counted in.

The "say it" column is only a guide, and what it cannot show is the tones. 月 yuè is a falling fourth tone in every month. The numbers keep their own tones in front of it: 一 yī, 三 sān, 七 qī and 八 bā high and level, 十 shí rising, 五 wǔ and 九 jiǔ low, 二 èr, 四 sì and 六 liù falling. The four tones are on one chart in the Mandarin tones.

Two tone rules that might seem to apply do not. 一 changes its tone before many syllables (in 一个 it is yí), but in a month name it is a number in a sequence, like an ordinal, and keeps its first tone: 一月 is yīyuè, and 十一月 shíyīyuè. 七 and 八 are sometimes changed in the same way before a fourth tone, but for most speakers today they stay first tones, so 七月 is qīyuè and 八月 bāyuè.

二月 or 两个月: February or two months?

This is the classic beginner's mistake. A number straight in front of 月 names a month; a number with the measure word 个 ge between counts months.

Two things happen at once in "two months". 月 is counted with 个, unlike 天 "day" and 年 "year", which take the number directly (两天, 两年). And before a measure word "two" is 两 liǎng, not 二, so 两个月 is "two months" and 二月 is never anything but a month's name. The rule for 两 and 二 is in Chinese numbers 1 to 100.

"A month" is said often. In the subtitle lists, 一个月 comes up 42.3 times per million words, about six times as often as the commonest month name.

月: month and moon

The character 月 began as a picture of a crescent moon, and it still means "moon" as well as "month". In everyday speech the moon is 月亮 yuèliang, with a neutral-tone second syllable, and the Moon as a body in space is 月球 yuèqiú. The subtitles say 月亮 23.1 times per million words, 3.3 times as often as the most-mentioned month.

How to say the date in Chinese

A Chinese date runs from the largest unit to the smallest: year, month, day, each followed by its word. 6 May 2027 is:

• 2027年5月6日 written,
• 2027年5月6号 èr líng èr qī nián wǔyuè liù hào said.

Three things to notice:

• 日 is written, 号 is said. Both mean the day of the month. 日 rì is what you see on paper; in speech the usual word is 号 hào, which Wiktionary marks as informal.
• The year is usually read digit by digit: 2027 is èr líng èr qī, "two zero two seven", not "two thousand and twenty-seven". 年 nián is "year". Written in characters it is 二零二七年, and you will also see a small circle, 〇, in place of 零: 二〇二七年. Usually 零 is preferred, but in some places 〇 is the commoner informal zero.
• The weekday comes last, after the day, often in brackets: 2027年5月6日（星期四）, "Thursday 6 May 2027". The days themselves are in days of the week in Chinese.

To ask the date, put 几 jǐ, "how many", where the number would go:

• 今天几月几号？ Jīntiān jǐ yuè jǐ hào? — What is the date today?
• 今天几号？ Jīntiān jǐ hào? — What's the date today? (when the month is obvious)
• 你的生日是几月几号？ Nǐ de shēngrì shì jǐ yuè jǐ hào? — When is your birthday?

The answer fills in the numbers: 今天五月六号。 Jīntiān wǔyuè liù hào. "Today is the sixth of May." There is no word for "on" or "in": a date, like any time word, goes at the start of the sentence or just after the subject, so "in May" is simply 五月: 我五月去北京。 Wǒ wǔyuè qù Běijīng. "I'm going to Beijing in May."

Last month, next month, this month

上 "up" is the past and 下 "down" is the future, as in 上星期 and 下星期 for last week and next week. In the subtitles, 上个月 (8.4 per million words) is a little more common than 下个月 (7.3), and the end of the month, 月底 and 月末 together, is said 4.3 times as often as the start, 月初.

The lunar months: 正月 and 腊月

China also keeps the traditional calendar, 农历 nónglì, which sets the dates of the Spring Festival and the Lantern Festival. The everyday Western calendar is 公历 gōnglì or 阳历 yánglì.

A lunar month begins on the day of the new moon and has 29 or 30 days, so its months do not line up with the Western ones. Twelve such months fall about eleven days short of a solar year, and to keep the calendar in step with the seasons a leap month, 闰月 rùnyuè, is added roughly one year in three. Most lunar months are numbered just like the Western ones (二月, 三月 …), so 二月 can mean either, and 农历二月 is the lunar one. Three have names of their own:

正 is read zhēng here, not the usual zhèng. 正月 is the month that begins at the Chinese New Year, and 腊月, the twelfth, is the month before it. In 2027 the twelfth month begins on 8 January, and 正月 on 6 February, which is New Year's Day of the Year of the Goat; the dates are on Chinese New Year 2027 greetings. The days of a lunar month are counted differently too: the first ten are 初一 chūyī to 初十 chūshí, so New Year's Day is 正月初一, and the Lantern Festival is the fifteenth of 正月.

The lunar names are rare in film dialogue: 正月 comes up 0.5 times per million words and 腊月 0.3.

Which month do Chinese films say most?

Counted in 85,487,865 words of Chinese film and television subtitles, April (7.0 per million words) and May (6.9) are level at the top, with July and June close behind. The three least-mentioned months are February, November and December, each at about three per million. All twelve together come to 60.6 per million words, about a third of the seven days of the week (177.0).

What a single-word count can and cannot show:

• Months written in digits are not counted. Subtitles can write May as 5月, and the list split the digit off, so a month written that way is lost to the count. That may be part of why the months trail the days, which subtitles write in characters. Bare 月, which collects those split dates along with "moon" and every other 月, is said about six times as often as the twelve month names together.
• The month names were counted only where the word-splitter kept them whole. It did for 一月 to 十二月, and for the 份 forms, 一月份 to 十二月份, which make up 8% of the count. It did not for 两个月, which was cut into pieces, so "February" against "two months" cannot be compared from this list.
• A month name can be something else. 一月 to 十二月 also number the lunar months, and any of them can be a name or part of a title, which a count cannot tell apart.
• Most of these subtitles are translated, mainly from English films.

The same count for Europe is in the months of the year in Italian, German and Portuguese.

Learn them in a sentence

• 现在是十二月。 Xiànzài shì shí'èryuè. — It's December now.
• 你几月去中国？ Nǐ jǐ yuè qù Zhōngguó? — Which month are you going to China?
• 我在北京住了两个月。 Wǒ zài Běijīng zhù le liǎng ge yuè. — I lived in Beijing for two months.
• 我的生日是八月十号。 Wǒ de shēngrì shì bāyuè shí hào. — My birthday is the tenth of August.
• 下个月见！ Xià ge yuè jiàn! — See you next month!

The months are in the most common Mandarin words, and the Mandarin course teaches them with dates and times, free on the web.

Sources

• The table of months is generated by rule by scripts/frequency_zhmonths.py, which checks itself against known forms (一月 yīyuè, 二月 èryuè, 十一月 shíyīyuè, 十二月 shí'èryuè and others) before it writes anything.
• CC-CEDICT, cc-cedict.org (also served by MDBG): 一月, 二月, 七月, 八月, 十一月 and 十二月 as the Western months and the lunar months, with their pinyin; 月 as "moon; month" with the measure word 个; 月亮, 月球, 月份; 号 and 日 as "day of the month"; 几; 上个月, 下个月, 本月, 每月, 月初, 月中, 月底, 月末, 上旬, 中旬 and 下旬; 农历, 阴历, 公历, 阳历; 正月 "first month of the lunar year", 冬月 "eleventh lunar month", 腊月 "twelfth lunar month", 闰月, 初一 "first day of a lunar month" and 元宵.
• AllSet Learning, Chinese Grammar Wiki: Structure of dates (year, month, day; 号 in speech and 日 in writing; years read digit by digit, as in èr-líng-yī-jiǔ nián; 一 in 1月 as Yī yuè), Comparing 二 and 两 (二月 "February" against 两个月 "two months"; 两天 and 两年 without 个) and Time words and word order (a time word at the start of the sentence or after the subject).
• Wiktionary: 月 (a pictogram of a crescent moon), 號 (the informal "day of the month", 11月2号) and 月份 (一月份, 五月份, 十二月份).
• Wikipedia, Chinese numerals: month names as numbers, 一月 yīyuè; years spoken as a sequence of digits; 〇 as an informal zero, more common in some areas.
• Wikipedia, Date and time notation in China: year, month, day; 号 as the colloquial day of the month; the day of the week after the date, often in brackets.
• Wikipedia, Standard Chinese phonology: 一 keeps its first tone as an ordinal and at the end of a word; 七 and 八 first tone for most modern speakers.
• Wikipedia, Chinese calendar: months beginning at the new moon, of 29 or 30 days; leap months; 正月, 冬月 and 腊月; 初一 to 初十; 农历 and 公历.
• Hong Kong Observatory, Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Table for 2027: the twelfth lunar month from 8 January 2027 and the first from 6 February 2027.
• The counts are from OpenSubtitles 2018 (Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J., 2016, aclanthology.org) through Hermit Dave's FrequencyWords list for simplified Chinese (zh_cn), content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, github.com. They are computed by scripts/frequency_zhmonths.py and printed from its output rather than typed.