Days of the Week in Chinese

By Ray Banks·July 4, 2026·Vocabulary

The days of the week in Chinese are 星期 (xīngqī, "week") plus a number: 星期一 Monday, 星期二 Tuesday, 星期三 Wednesday, 星期四 Thursday, 星期五 Friday, 星期六 Saturday — and then Sunday breaks the pattern as 星期日 or 星期天, never 星期七. If you can count to six, you already know six-sevenths of this. The wrinkle worth ten more minutes is that Chinese has three interchangeable words for "week" — 星期, 周 and 礼拜 — and which one you hear depends on where you are and whether it's spoken or written.

The seven days of the week in Chinese

Tap any card to hear it. Notice how little there is to memorize: the only new material in the whole list is the word 星期 itself and the two Sunday forms.

星期, 周, or 礼拜: the three systems side by side

All three words mean "week," and all three take the same numbers in the same slot. Swap the front and the rest of the phrase is untouched — which means learning the second and third systems costs you two words, not fourteen.

Which one do people actually say? Mainland vs Taiwan

This is where most weekday guides stop short, and it's the part that decides whether you sound like a textbook. The three systems are not evenly distributed.

• Mainland China: 星期一 is the neutral spoken standard and what schools teach. 周一 dominates writing — news, timetables, work chat — and is increasingly said out loud too, because it's a syllable shorter. 礼拜一 sounds casual and slightly old-fashioned in the north, but is unremarkable in the south.
• Taiwan: 禮拜一 is the everyday conversational default — you'll hear it constantly. 週一 handles writing, and 週休二日 is the standard term for the two-day weekend. 星期一 is entirely correct and widely used; the difference is that Taiwan's standard reading of 期 is qí, so the word is xīngqí, not xīngqī. Neither reading is wrong — they're two standards.
• Clipped forms: in fast Taiwanese Mandarin, 禮拜一 often loses its first syllable: 拜一, 拜二, 拜三. Sunday stays 禮拜天. It's casual speech, not something to write.

If you're learning specifically for Taiwan, get comfortable hearing 禮拜 even if you keep saying 星期 — comprehension is the asymmetric skill here. We keep the same both-Mandarins stance across the app, where every story runs in Mainland or Taiwan narration, and in Simplified or Traditional-script reading practice.

Why does Sunday break the pattern?

Because Sunday isn't counted — it's named. The Chinese seven-day week arrived through the 七曜 (qīyào) system, the "seven luminaries" of classical astronomy, in which each day belongs to the sun, the moon and the five visible planets. The sun's day heads that cycle, and it kept its own character: 日. When the modern numbered names were adopted, the counting started from the day after — so Monday became "week one," and Sunday sits outside the numbers entirely.

Two practical consequences. First, 星期七 does not exist; it's the single most reliable tell of a beginner. Second, Sunday alone has a spoken/written split: 星期天 in conversation, 星期日 on the calendar, 周日 in writing, 礼拜天 in casual speech. All four mean Sunday and none is more correct.

One more oddity to expect: many printed calendars still lay Sunday out in the first column, even though the naming counts from Monday. The words and the grid disagree, and everybody lives with it.

How do you ask what day it is?

You ask with 几 (jǐ), the question word that stands in for a small number — literally "today is week-which-number?"

You can add 是: 今天是星期三 is equally correct and slightly more deliberate. What you must not do is use 吗 — 今天星期几吗 is ungrammatical, because a sentence can only ask one question at a time. And don't confuse this with 今天几号？(jīntiān jǐ hào?), which asks for the date, not the day. That distinction, along with months and clock times, is laid out in our Chinese time vocabulary guide.

Today, tomorrow, yesterday

These are the words you'll actually use most — far more often than the weekday names. Across the 658 graded stories in the Literate Chinese catalog (141,730 hanzi occurrences, July 2026), 天 is the 15th most frequent character with 1,403 appearances, while 星 ranks only 146th with 208. Stories say "the next day" and "that evening" much more than they say "on Tuesday" — so learn this grid first if you're short on time.

Last week, this week, next week

Chinese places weeks on a vertical axis: 上 (up) is the past, 下 (down) is the future — the same metaphor that gives 上午 for morning and 下午 for afternoon.

The 个 is a measure word and it's required with 星期 but not with 周: 上个星期 ✓, 上周 ✓, but not 上个周. That asymmetry catches nearly everyone once.

Where does the day go in a sentence?

Before the verb — always. Chinese time expressions set the stage before anything happens, and they take no preposition, so the English "on Monday" loses its "on" completely.

星期, 周, 礼拜: what the characters mean

• 星 xīng — star. The top is 日 (sun) and the bottom is 生, giving the sound.
• 期 qī (Taiwan: qí) — a period, a scheduled span of time; the 月 on the right is the moon, the original measurer of periods. 星期 together is "star period," a translation of the seven-luminaries week.
• 周 zhōu (Traditional 週) — a cycle, a circuit, going all the way round. The Traditional form adds 辶, the movement radical, which makes the "going around" idea visible. Careful: plain 周 is also a common surname and means "circumference," so in Traditional text the week word must be 週.
• 礼拜 lǐbài (Traditional 禮拜) — literally "ritual bow," i.e. worship. The weekday sense came in through Christian church services — 礼拜天 was the day you went to worship — and then went completely secular. Nobody hearing 礼拜三 thinks about church.
• 天 tiān vs 日 rì — both mean "day," with 天 spoken and 日 written. The same split runs through 今天/今日 and 生日 vs 星期天.

Which form should I use? A quick comparison

Mistakes to avoid

• 星期七 ✗ → 星期日 / 星期天 ✓. The numbers stop at six. This is the error that most reliably marks a beginner, and it's a one-second fix.
• 在星期一我去… ✗ → 星期一我去… ✓. Chinese time words don't take a preposition. There's no "on" to translate; delete it and the sentence is correct.
• 我去星期一 ✗ → 我星期一去 ✓. Time goes before the verb, not after it. English word order will fight you here for months; it's worth drilling three sentences until it feels wrong the other way.
• 上个周 ✗ → 上周 or 上个星期 ✓. 星期 takes the measure word 个; 周 doesn't. Mixing the two halves is the most common intermediate slip.
• Writing 周一 in Traditional text. In Traditional script the week word is 週 — 週一, 週末. Plain 周 there reads as the surname Zhou. Simplified merged the two, which is why the habit slips through.

Weekends, work weeks, and where you'll meet these words

The two-day weekend is recent enough to have its own vocabulary. In Mainland China the standard five-day week is called 双休 (shuāngxiū, "double rest") and the weekend itself is 周末; in Taiwan the same arrangement is 週休二日. When a Saturday gets worked to bridge a public holiday — a routine occurrence around Mainland holidays — you'll hear 调休 (tiáoxiū), "shifted rest," which explains why a Chinese colleague may be at their desk on 星期六.

The best way to make any of this automatic is to meet the words in sentences you're reading for the story rather than for the grammar. The free browser story Cleaning the Room opens on 星期六早上 ("Saturday morning") and spends the rest of its length on ordinary household verbs; A New Beginning uses 这几个星期 ("these past few weeks") to look back over a stretch of time, which is the harder, more grown-up use of the word. Both take about three minutes to read. If you want the phrases that go around them — greetings, introductions, arranging to meet — they're collected in our Chinese phrases guide.