Days, months and seasons

The one rule that trips people up

lundi, janvier, le printemps — none of these are capitalised in French, even at the start of a sentence-internal date like le lundi 12 janvier. Capitalising them the way English does is one of the most common habits to carry over, and it is checked in written French. Typing the answer here in lowercase, the way you would write it for real, builds the habit directly.

Seasons are the odd one out: they keep their article as part of the word —le printemps, l'été, l'automne,l'hiver — the same "learn the article with the word" habit that matters for noun gender (see Le or La?).

Saying a date out loud

A French date is built day, then month, with a definite article in front and no preposition between the parts: le 12 janvier, le 3 mars. There is no equivalent of "the 12th of January", and no ordinal — you say le douze, not le douzième. The single exception is the first of the month, which does take an ordinal: le premier mai, written le 1^er mai.

This matters for more than speaking. Written numerically, a Canadian French date runs day/month/year, so 03/04 is 3 April and not 3 March — a genuine source of missed appointments for newcomers reading a letter from a landlord or a clinic. When a date must be unambiguous, French Canadian official forms use the year-month-day order (2026-04-03).

"On Monday" vs "on Mondays"

French marks the difference with the article alone, and nothing else changes.Lundi, je travaille means this coming Monday.Le lundi, je travaille means every Monday, as a habit. English needs a plural and a preposition to say the same thing; French needs one two-letter word, which is exactly why it gets missed in listening. The same pattern runs through the months —en janvier is in January, au mois de janvier is the slightly more formal equivalent you will meet in written texts.

Seasons split between two prepositions for a reason worth knowing rather than memorising:en before a vowel sound and au before a consonant, so en été, en automne, en hiver — where the h is silent — but au printemps. It is a pronunciation rule wearing a grammar costume, and the liaison and elision lesson explains the pattern it belongs to.

Where these words come from

The days are not arbitrary syllables, and seeing the pattern once makes all seven stick. Five end in -di from the Latin for day, attached to a planet:lundi (moon, lune), mardi (Mars),mercredi (Mercury), jeudi (Jupiter),vendredi (Venus). The weekend pair puts the day-word first instead:samedi and dimanche. English keeps the same planets under Norse names, which is why Wednesday and mercredi look unrelated but mean the same thing.

The full list

All 23 words the drill uses — 7 days, 12 months and4 seasons — with the Gurmukhi respelling for each.

Word list last updated 2026-07-26.

Keep going

• Numbers, dates and time (full lesson)A1
• Practise telling timeGame
• Practise saying yearsGame
• Practise plain numbers, 0 to 1000Game