This cheat sheet covers the Spanish words and sentence patterns students need to talk about days, months, seasons, and dates. It helps students read calendars, answer classroom questions, and write simple date sentences correctly. The main goal is to make common calendar phrases easy to remember and use.
Key Facts
- The days of the week in Spanish are lunes, martes, miércoles, jueves, viernes, sábado, and domingo.
- The months in Spanish are enero, febrero, marzo, abril, mayo, junio, julio, agosto, septiembre, octubre, noviembre, and diciembre.
- Spanish days and months are not capitalized unless they begin a sentence.
- To say the date, use the pattern Hoy es el número de mes, as in Hoy es el 5 de mayo.
- For the first day of a month, use primero instead of uno, as in Es el primero de enero.
- To ask what day it is, say ¿Qué día es hoy?, and answer Hoy es lunes.
- To ask the date, say ¿Cuál es la fecha?, and answer Es el 12 de octubre.
- The seasons are la primavera, el verano, el otoño, and el invierno.
Vocabulary
- día
- A día is a day, such as lunes or martes.
- mes
- A mes is a month, such as enero or febrero.
- estación
- An estación is a season, such as primavera or invierno.
- fecha
- A fecha is a calendar date with a day number and a month.
- hoy
- Hoy means today and is used to talk about the current day or date.
- cumpleaños
- Cumpleaños means birthday and is often used with a date, as in Mi cumpleaños es el 7 de abril.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Capitalizing every day and month is incorrect because Spanish usually uses lowercase for lunes, enero, and other calendar words.
- Writing el uno de mayo is incorrect for the first day of the month because Spanish uses el primero de mayo.
- Forgetting accents in miércoles and sábado is incorrect because accents are part of the correct spelling.
- Using en before a full date is incorrect in the basic date pattern because Spanish says Es el 10 de marzo.
- Mixing up otoño and invierno is a common mistake because otoño means fall or autumn, while invierno means winter.
Practice Questions
- 1 Write this date in Spanish: May 5.
- 2 Write this date in Spanish: January 1.
- 3 Answer in Spanish: ¿Qué día es hoy? Use a complete sentence.
- 4 Explain why Spanish months and days are usually written with lowercase letters instead of capital letters.
Understanding Days, Months & Seasons
Calendar words do more than name boxes on a page. They help show when an event happens and whether it happens once or regularly. For one specific day, Spanish commonly uses el before the day name.
El lunes can mean on Monday. For a repeated routine, use los. Los lunes means on Mondays.
This difference is useful for school schedules. El jueves hay un examen describes one exam.
Los jueves hay música describes a weekly class. Many Spanish calendars place lunes first, so students should notice that the order may look different from calendars used at home.
Spanish dates put the day number before the month. The small word de links the parts of the date. It works like the English word of.
A written date such as el quince de abril is read in that same order. The first day needs special care because Spanish uses primero rather than the regular number word. After that, ordinary counting numbers are used.
Dates do not usually use English endings such as first, second, or third. When a year is included, it comes after another de.
This makes a full date sound like the fifteenth of April of two thousand twenty-four. Learning the spoken order helps students understand announcements, invitations, and forms.
The seasons are often used with en to describe a general time of year. En verano means in summer. En invierno means in winter.
A month can work the same way. En noviembre means in November. For a particular day, Spanish normally uses el instead.
El tres de noviembre points to one date. This choice between en and el is important because it changes the meaning from a broad time period to a specific day. Seasons do not happen at the same time everywhere.
When it is summer in Spain, it is winter in countries far south of the equator, such as Argentina and Chile. A calendar word can therefore connect to weather, clothing, sports, holidays, and family plans.
Careful spelling matters with calendar vocabulary. Miércoles has an accent mark, and the accent shows where the voice stress belongs. Leaving it out may still be understood in casual writing, but correct spelling is expected in school work.
Days and months usually begin with lowercase letters in Spanish, unlike English. This is a common transfer mistake for English speakers. Practice by writing real information instead of only memorizing lists.
Write a birthday, a holiday, a class meeting, or a weather sentence for each season. Read each sentence aloud and check whether it describes one day, a regular day, a month, or a season. That habit makes the grammar easier to notice and remember.