Reading Years (二〇二四年)

English lets you say a year as a compressed pair of numbers — "twenty twenty-four," "nineteen ninety-eight" — chopping the four figures into two two-digit chunks. Chinese does the opposite: it reads a year the way you'd read a code or a phone number, one figure at a time, then closes with 年 (nián, "year"). So 2024 is 二〇二四年 (èr líng èr sì nián) — literally "two, zero, two, four, year" — and 1998 is 一九九八年 (yī jiǔ jiǔ bā nián), "one, nine, nine, eight, year." There is no place value, no "thousand," no "hundred." Once you stop trying to build the number arithmetically and just recite the digits, years become one of the easiest things to say in the language. This page zooms in on the reading; for how the year fits into a full date (year → month → day), see the dates page.

Digit by digit, then 年

The whole rule is: take the four written figures, say each one on its own using the plain digits 0–9, and add 年 at the end. You never combine them into a big number.

To ask which year, use 哪一年 (nǎ yì nián, "which year") — note that here 一 is the ordinary "one" and takes tone sandhi to yì, because it's counting a year, not reciting a figure.

The zero: 〇 or 零 (líng)

A zero inside a year is read líng and can be written two ways: the circle 〇 or the full character 零. Both are correct; 〇 is the standard, clean choice in dates and is what you'll see in newspapers and on official documents, while 零 is never wrong and turns up in more formal or handwritten contexts.

二 not 两, and 一 stays 一

Two habits from ordinary numbers do not carry into years:

• The "2" is always 二, never 两. Inside a year every figure is a bare digit, and the digit "two" is 二 (èr), not 两 (liǎng). So 2024 is 二〇二四, and 2022 is 二〇二二 — never 两〇两两. 两 is reserved for counting things (两个, 两千); a year counts nothing, it just labels a point in time.
• 一 keeps its plain first tone, yī. In a year, 一 is a recited digit, so it does not take the usual tone sandhi (it's not yì or yí here), and it is not read yāo the way phone and room numbers often read 1. 1918 is simply yī jiǔ yī bā nián.

There is exactly one place the "big number" reading survives: the round millennium year 2000, which people very often say colloquially as 两千年 (liǎng qiān nián) — because it happens to be a clean 2,000. Even so, the careful, digit-by-digit reading is 二〇〇〇年 (èr líng líng líng nián), and it's the safe default. For any other year, the whole-number form (两千零二十四年 "two thousand and twenty-four") sounds like you're reading a bank balance, not a date.

Decades, short years, and centuries

Chinese has a compact vocabulary for talking about spans of years, and it's worth learning alongside the digit-by-digit rule:

• A decade is 年代 (niándài): 八十年代 (bāshí niándài) = "the eighties," 九十年代 (jiǔshí niándài) = "the nineties." Note this one does use the tens number 八十, because you're naming a decade, not spelling out a year.
• A short, casual year drops the century: 你是几几年的？ ("what year are you from?") gets answers like 九五年的 (jiǔ wǔ nián de) = "a '95-er, born in 1995." This is the everyday way to ask someone's age-cohort without asking their age.
• A century is 世纪 (shìjì): 二十世纪 (èrshí shìjì) = the 20th century, 二十一世纪 (èrshí yī shìjì) = the 21st.

Common Mistakes

1. Reading a year as one big number. Recite the figures; don't build a thousands number.

2. Using 两 for the 2s in a year. Every figure is a bare digit, so "two" is 二, never 两.

3. Reading a decade digit by digit. A specific year is spelled out figure by figure, but a decade uses the ordinary tens number.

4. Forgetting the zero. A blank place must be voiced as 〇 (líng); years never drop a middle digit.

Key Takeaways

• A year is read digit by digit and capped with 年: 二〇二四年 = "two-zero-two-four, year." No 千, no 百, no arithmetic.
• Zero is 〇 or 零, both read líng; 〇 is the standard form in dates.
• The "2" in a year is always 二, never 两 — a year labels a point, it doesn't count things.
• 一 stays plain yī in a year: no tone sandhi, and never the yāo of phone numbers.
• The only whole-number holdout is the millennium 两千年 (year 2000); everything else is digit by digit.
• Decades (八十年代) and centuries (二十世纪) use ordinary tens numbers — the digit-by-digit rule is for specific years only.