The Days Of The Week In Mandarin Chinese

In my last article, we learned how to say the month and the date in Mandarin. In this one, we will wrap up the topic of “dates” by reviewing the days of the week.

A Quick Review

In order to express the month and the date in Mandarin, all we need to do is place a number before the character 月 (yuè, month) and another number before the character 日 (rì, day). This basic “equation” is simply _______ 月 _____ 日.

For the days of the week, the general concept is the same, just with some minor differences. Before we start, let’s first take a look at all the words that we will need.

Word List:

Learning how to say the days of the week

The phrase 星期 xīng qī means “week” or “day of the week.” For the purposes of studying this concept, we are going to go with the “day of the week” translation. So, for Monday, we say:

• 星期一 (xīng qī yī, Monday)

Where 星期 xīng qī means “day of week” and 一 yī is “one.” From the perspective of an equation, you can think of it as:

• Day of the week + X

where the X is a number from one to six, with “one” representing Monday, “two” representing Tuesday, and so on.

Therefore, Tuesday in Chinese Mandarin is 星期二 xīng qī èr.

Now, can you tell me how to say Wednesday through Saturday in Chinese Mandarin? Use the chart below as a hint if needed.

Answers:

You might have noticed that I did not ask about Sunday, and that is because Sunday is a bit special. Depending on your cultural background, you may consider either Monday or Sunday to be the first day of the week. I have a tip below to help you remember this one after we go over Sunday.

The truth is that Sunday in Chinese is actually quite similar to Sunday in English. Instead of using “seven” to represent Sunday, we actually use 日 rì. In our last article, we learned that 日 rì means day.

Well, another meaning of 日 rì is “Sun.” So, think of it as the “Sun” in “Sunday.” The Sun is often used to symbolize the beginning of something new. So, if you consider Sunday to be the first day of the week, then you can imagine the week beginning with the Sun, followed by the numbers “one” through “six.”

Another tip to help you remember that 一 yī is associated with Monday is to remember that Monday is often the first day of the work week.

We now have a complete list of all the days of the week! However, with just this list, we still can’t really use these words in a sentence yet. So, let’s bring this up a notch so that we can walk away knowing a sentence instead of just a list of words.

Let’s add three more new words to our list:

To say “today is…” or “tomorrow is…” all we need to do is add “today” or “tomorrow” before our day of the week. That is it!

For example:

Now you try it! Can you tell me how to say the following sentences in Chinese Mandarin?  

• Today is Tuesday.
• Tomorrow is Friday.

Answer:

Let’s be engineers!

Oh, well I don’t mean to be an engineer literally. Instead, we are going to use the “reverse engineering” technique! Let’s take a look at the following sentence:

In this sentence, we can assume that the question is “What day is today?” In this case, the key character that provides us with the answer is 二 èr, which indicates that it is the second day of the week. So, in order to form a question for this sentence, we will replace 二 èr with a question word. The question word that we will be using is 几 jĭ. Therefore, the sentence now becomes:

几 jĭ is one of my favorite characters because you can use it to ask so many questions! However, in this article, we are going to use “what” as our definition. Now you know how to ask and answer questions related to the days of the week! Check out the mini test below to see if you can understand the conversation. Good luck!  

Mini Test:

Answer:

Image Sources

Hero Image by Tom Small (CC BY-SA 2.0)