This is lesson 8 of Crashed Culture’s Spanish Grammar Series.

Days, Months, and Seasons in Spanish

Time to address time. The days, months, and seasons in Spanish have a few little rules that are important to know, or else you’re going to make a whole lot of very silly mistakes, and it’s going to be really frustrating.

Difficult? Nah. This lesson is mostly just vocab, with a couple little grammar lessons sprinkled in.

The days of the month in Spanish

So, first things first: the days of the month in Spanish. Here are the grammatical rules to know about the days, which you’ll be able to understand better when you see the actual words.

• The week starts with Monday
• All days are lowercase
• All days are masculine
• When weekdays are plural, only the article changes

Check it out:

Right off the bat you see what I mean with those first 3 bullet points: we start with Monday, everything’s lowercase, and everything’s masculine.

The thing I also want you to see is how lunes - viernes all end with an ‘s’, but sábado and domingo do not. This is that last bullet point. If we’re going plural, it looks like this:

Days of the month in Spanish: sentences

Remember the lesson on ser and estar? In that chapter, we talked about addressing times and dates with ser. Time to see what that looks like!

Hoy es lunes (Today is Monday)
Mañana es martes (Tomorrow is Tuesday)
La fiesta es el viernes (The party is on Friday)
La reunión es el jueves (The meeting is on Thursday)

Take a good, solid look at those last two sentences. If you notice (which you should, considering it’s bold and underlined!), we use the noun’s article (el) like we use the word ‘on’ in English.

So, you will never, ever say: El evento es en martes

Instead, you should say: El evento es el martes

I know that the first sentence is our natural inclination as English speakers, but it’s wrong. Get it? Got it? Good!

Finally, one last note about the days of the week before moving on. I know we haven’t addressed the future tense just yet, but when we talk about the days of the week, we can correctly talk about the near future with the present tense. Like this:

Mañana es martes (Tomorrow [will be] Tuesday)
Vuelvo el domingo (I [will] return on Sunday)

The months in Spanish

We’re done with the days of the week, so let’s move on to the months in Spanish! These are generally easier, because not only are they closer to their English counterparts, but there are also less rules.

Again, no capitalization! That’s no new rule. There is one new rule though: this time, when we’re saying ‘in’ a certain month, we do use ‘en’:

El concierto es en julio (The concern is in July)
Nieva en diciembre (It snows in December)

Seasons in Spanish

Finally, we have the seasons in Spanish. Like the days of the week, seasons carry their articles with them as well.

Lastly, when we talk about the date in Spanish, the order is flipped.

While we’re used to: 01/05/2000

In Spanish, it’s: 05/01/2000

Just flip the month and day around, and you’re set. A little quirky, but nothing we can’t handle!

So, to review

• Days of the week start on Monday, are always lowercase, and are always masculine
• Months of the year are also all lowercase
• Days of the week use ‘el’ in place of ‘on’ (on Monday = el lunes)
• Months of the year use ‘en’ in place of ‘in’ (in January = en enero)
• When talking about date, use Day/Month/Year, not Month/Day/Year