How To Read Dates In English - Spoken English Lesson

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See the full lesson (with a text and exercises) here: oxfordonlineenglish.com/video-reading-dates

When is your birthday? This is a simple question, but many English learners cannot answer without making a mistake. In this lesson, you can learn how to read dates, months and years correctly in English.

Contents:
1. Reading Dates 0:27
2. Reading Years 1:17
3. Shorten Years 3:35

In this video, you can learn:
- The different ways to read dates
- When and where to use the word 'the' in dates
- The rules for pronouncing years
- How to shorten dates

Let's start with an example date: November 14th

How can you say it? There are two common possibilities:

- "November the fourteenth"
- "The fourteenth of November"

Both are correct, and it doesn't matter which you use. The most important point is that the words the and of are almost never written. If you see September 30th written, you need to add the words the and/or of when you read the date:

- "September the thirtieth"
- "The thirtieth of September"

What about years? How would you say these years?

- 1902
- 1980
- 2001

- 1902—"nineteen oh two"
- 1980—"nineteen eighty"
- 2001—"two thousand and one"

How you read a year depends on whether you are talking about a year before or after 2000—we use different rules for different years. Find the details in the video!

You can also shorten dates, for example:

- 1981—eighty-one - "My brother was born in eighty-one"
- 2001—oh-one - "I graduated in oh-one"

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