Months in Chinese: Names, Pinyin, and How Many Months Are in a Chinese Year

Good news for anyone learning Chinese: the months are the easiest vocabulary you’ll ever meet. No Latin gods, no emperors, no spelling traps.

January is one moon. February is two moon. You can guess the rest.

The months in Chinese are a number plus yue (月), the word for both month and moon. January is yiyue (一月), February is eryue (二月), and December is shi’eryue (十二月). Learn one to twelve, and you know all twelve months.

The 12 Months in Chinese

If the numbers themselves are still wobbly, a quick run through Chinese numbers makes this table click.

How to Say the Months in Chinese

Say the number, then yue with a falling fourth tone, like a firm no. That’s all there is to it.

Two small things are worth knowing. Yue is also the word for moon, a reminder that months were once counted by the moon. And there are no abbreviations to learn: no Jan, no Feb, just the number and yue, every time.

March or Three Months?

This is the one trap in the whole set. Sanyue (三月) means March. To say three months, the length of time, you need a small counting word in the middle: san ge yue (三个月).

So if someone says they’ll be in China for liu ge yue, they’re staying half a year, not arriving in June. That little ge (个) does a lot of work, and it’s one of the measure words that shows up everywhere in Chinese.

Last Month, This Month, Next Month

Chinese time has a direction you might not expect. For months and weeks, the one before is up, and the one after is down.

• Last month: shang ge yue (上个月), the up month
• This month: zhe ge yue (这个月)
• Next month: xia ge yue (下个月), the down month

The same pattern works for weeks: shang zhou (上周) is last week, xia zhou (下周) is next week. Once you picture time flowing downward, like a scroll unrolling, it sticks.

How Many Months Are in a Chinese Year?

It depends which calendar you mean, and China uses two.

The everyday calendar has 12 months. Work, school, and official dates in China follow the Gregorian calendar, called gongli (公历), exactly like the rest of the world. China’s public holidays mix both calendars, though: National Day is always October 1, while Spring Festival follows the traditional one.

The traditional Chinese calendar usually has 12 months too, but sometimes 13. It’s often called the lunar calendar, but nongli (农历) is really lunisolar. Its months follow the moon, while the sun’s position, marked by the 24 solar terms, keeps it in step with the seasons. One of those solar terms, Qingming, is also a festival.

Each month lasts 29 or 30 days, so twelve of them fall about 11 days short of a solar year. To stop the seasons from drifting, a leap month, runyue (闰月), gets added roughly every three years, seven times in every 19.

A leap year doesn’t simply add a month 13. Instead, one lunar month repeats. A leap second month, for example, is run eryue (闰二月): another second lunar month before the calendar moves on to the third.

Which month repeats? Normally, each lunar month contains one of the 12 major solar terms. If a month doesn’t, it becomes a leap version of the month before it.

Because the traditional Chinese calendar is lunisolar, Chinese New Year falls on a different Gregorian date each year, between January 21 and February 20.

Lunar Month Names

Most lunar months are simply numbered in everyday use, but three special names come up often:

• Zhengyue (正月): the first month, home to Chinese New Year and a long stretch of celebrations
• Dongyue (冬月): the eleventh month, the winter month
• Layue (腊月): the twelfth month, the busy run-up to the new year

One pronunciation trap: 正 is usually read with a falling tone (zhèng), but in 正月 it’s level (zhēngyuè).

Lunar days have their own style too. The first ten are chuyi (初一) through chushi (初十), and the fifteenth, shiwu (十五), is traditionally associated with the full moon. Astronomically, though, the moon can reach its fullest point on the 14th, 15th, 16th, or even 17th lunar day. The 16th is common enough to inspire a saying: shiwu de yueliang shiliu yuan (十五的月亮十六圆), the moon of the fifteenth is roundest on the sixteenth.

You already know several lunar dates without realizing it:

Notice how many festivals land on a doubled number or the traditional full moon. It makes the dates hard to forget.

Are There Months in the Chinese Zodiac?

When people ask for your Chinese zodiac sign, they mean the animal of your birth year, not your birth month.

In BaZi, or Four Pillars, each month pillar has an Earthly Branch associated with one of the twelve zodiac animals. These aren’t ordinary calendar months. The Tiger month begins at lichun (立春, Start of Spring) in early February, followed by Rabbit at jingzhe (惊蛰), Dragon at qingming (清明), and so on through the Ox month, which begins around xiaohan (小寒) in early January. The month changes at one of twelve specific jie (节) solar terms, not on the first day of a Gregorian or lunar month, so you can’t simply say February is the Tiger.

Days and Months in Chinese

Once you have the months, days of the week follow the same easy logic. Monday is xingqiyi (星期一), week one, and so on up to Saturday, xingqiliu (星期六). Sunday breaks the pattern: xingqitian (星期天) or xingqiri (星期日).

Put the pieces together, and you can write any date in Chinese. The order is year, month, day, the same big-to-small order Chinese uses everywhere, and the Chinese date format takes about ten seconds once you’ve seen one.

Twelve months, one pattern, and a single ge that turns March into three months. Few corners of Chinese are this friendly.

Save this table for your next Chinese lesson. And if you enjoy little aha moments like the up-and-down months, the Stellar Chinese newsletter sends more of them, along with culture, everyday life, and what’s changing in China. The sign-up is on this page.