Dates are important parts of everyday and today we are going to learn how to say dates in Spanish. Of course, to write out dates in Spanish first we need to know numbers, have you already done that? Click in the like if you want to review them.
We will also learn “los días de la semana” (days of the week) and “los meses del año” (months of the year). Let start with a video, it will be more fun.
Days, months, and dates in Spanish
Watch the video (from why not Spanish) several times and try to repeat, stop the video when you need it.
guidelines for talking about dates in Spanish
- Unless you use them at the beginning of a sentence, you do not capitalize the days of the week and months in Spanish.
Agosto y septiembre son mis meses favoritos (My favourites months are August and September).
- We use “el” to express on when referring to a particular day of the week and “los” to express on when the action occurs repeatedly:
No trabajo el lunes (I’m not working on Monday).
No trabajo los lunes (I don’t work on Mondays).
- We also use “el” to express on with Spanish dates:
Nos marchamos el 5 de septiembre (We are leaving on September 5th).
- Nevertheless, “el” is not written after verb SER
Hoy es martes (Today is Tuesday)
- With months, years, and seasons the preposition “en” is used instead in.
Vamos de vacaciones en agosto (We go on holidays in August).
Mi hijo nació en 2010 (My son was born in 2010).
En verano hace mucho calor (In Summer it is very hot).
- We normally don´t use ordinal numbers on dates, although in some Spanish speaking countries can do it, but only with the first day of each month.
El 25 de diciembre es Navidad (December 25 is Christmas).
El primero de mayo es fiesta ((May first is bank holiday).
- In Spanish, we express years in thousands and hundreds, not only in hundreds:
1492: mil cuatrocientos noventa y dos.
- The full date is DAY+ DE + MONTH + DE + YEAR:
Francisco de Goya nació el 30 de marzo de 1746.
- Be careful, in Spanish, when dates are written as numbers, they follow the sequence day/month/year, which may prove confusing to English speakers — especially for dates below the 12th of the month. You write February 9th as 2/9 in English, but in Spanish, it’s 9/2
- There is a lot of vocabulary related to dates in Spanish that you need to learn, click the link to practice 20 expressions related to the calendar with flashcards
Time to practice
Now it is time you practice everything you have learned during the lesson with these interactive quizzes. Remember you can contact your tutor with any questions you have about dates in Spanish. Don’t you have a Spanish tutor yet?