3.18: Structure - Les dates
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- 109213
In this section, you will learn how to say what the date is.
On étudie !
Quelle est la date ?
(a) To ask what the date is, you say, Quelle est la date ? To answer, you say:
C'est + le + numéro + mois
C'est le 10 octobre
C'est le 5 mars
C'est le 30 juin
— Quelle est la date ? (What is the date ?)
— C'est le 14 septembre. (It's September 14th.)
For the first day of every month, we use the ordinal number premier (first) instead of un (one):
C'est le premier novembre. (It's the first of November. It's November first.)
For every other day after the first, you simply use the number: le deux novembre, le trois novembre, etc.
If you want to include the year in the date, simply add the year afterward:
C'est le 26 mars 2022
(c) To say what date a certain event (holiday, birthday, meeting, etc.) is "on", you use the same formula as above. You keep the "le" to express "on":
Noël est le 25 décembre. (Christmas is on December 25th)
(d) When the date is written out in numbers it follows the same order as the formula above: day/month/year (or DD/MM/Year), not month/day/year (MM/DD/Year) as we do in English. Thus February 17, 2020 in French would be: 17/02/2020
In French, birthday is anniversaire, while the more official sounding date of birth would be date de naissance.
(e) To say in which year something occurs, we use the preposition en:
Je suis né en 2002. (I was born in 2002.)
Je vais acheter une maison en 2028. (I am going to buy a house in 2028.)
On approfondit !
Use the following resources to type accents and/or search for words:
- Accents: ç, à, é, è, â, ê, î, ô, û, ù, ë, ï, ü
- Dictionnaire français-anglais