Whether you’re studying Russian, planning a trip to Moscow this year, setting the date for a Russian dinner party or trying really hard to impress your new friend Vova, it’s probably not a bad idea for you to learn how to write the date in Russian correctly, as well as articulate it out loud the way a native Russian would. One thing that’ll trip up Americans right off the bat is that Russians generally write the date in a “day/month/year” format, which means your hotel reservations for “06.09.2019” are actually for September 6, not June 9. Here’s everything else you need to know.
Days Of The Week In Russian
To use the construction “on + day of the week”, you put the preposition в in front of the day (so “в понедельник” means “on Monday”). For Tuesday, this changes slightly to во вторник. Feminine nouns ending in -a take the ending -у in the accusative case: среда – в среду; пятница – в пятницу, суббота – в субботу.
Monday — понедельник
Tuesday — вторник
Wednesday — среда
Thursday — четверг
Friday — пятница
Saturday — суббота
Sunday — воскресенье
Months Of The Year In Russian
To use the construction “in + month” in Russian, you put the preposition в in front of the month. The month is then in the prepositional case and takes the ending -e.
January — январь
February — февраль
March — март
April — апрель
May — май
June — июнь
July — июль
August — август
September — сентябрь
October — октябрь
November — ноябрь
December — декабрь
How To Write The Date In Russian
When it comes to the Russian date format, you’ve got a couple options. To indicate “February 28, 1976,” you could write:
- 28.02.1976
- 28 февраля 1976 года
- 28 февраля 1976 г. (short for года, or “year”)
Note that in this case, the month takes on the genitive case, so “февраль” becomes “февраля.” The word “year” (or “года”) is also expressed in the genitive case.
Similarly to how dates are written in a “day-month-year” order, it’s customary to speak like this too. So if you’re trying to say “August 11, 2019,” you would essentially end up saying something like “11th of August of the 2019th year.”
Note that the numerals aren’t expressed as “one,” but “first”; not “two,” but “second.” Additionally, months take on a genitive case to express the concept of “of August,” so it wouldn’t be “одиннадцатое август,” but “одиннадцатое августа.”
To say the year out loud, you would say “two-thousand-nineteenth year,” which can be expressed as either “две тысячи девятнадцатый год” or “две тысячи девятнадцатого года.”