Practice English Speaking&Listening with: How to Say the Date in British English

Today, we're gonna learn how to say the dates in British English, and we're gonna

learn right now!

So what is a date?

No not that type of date! I mean dates of time like your birthday,

today's date, or when you're going to go on holiday, for instance. It's really

common for English learners to say the dates incorrectly, which unfortunately

can create a lot of confusion, and to add to that confusion Americans say the

dates in a different format. But don't worry, because in today's lesson I'm

gonna explain everything very clearly. So what are we going to cover? First, we're

going to learn how to ask for the date. Second, how to say the date. Third, we're

going to learn the difference between British English dates and American dates.

Fourth... What is fourth? We have first, second, third, fourth. These are what we

call ordinal numbers, so we'll be learning these too. Fifth, we're gonna

learn how to say the days of the week correctly. Sixth, how to say the month

correctly. Seventh, how to say the year correctly, and then at the very end we'll

practice with some dates. How to ask for the dates? Well, there's a few different

ways to ask but we always use the what question word in the sentence. For

example, what date is it? What's the date today? What's today's date? How do we say

the date? Well, we have three formats to display the date, but the way we say the

date is pretty much always the same. The date is the 1st of July, 2019 or the

1st of july, 2019. Now, notice we might not write 'the' and 'of' but we always say them.

For this example I used the weak form of the definite article 'the', but for

instance if the date starts with a vowel sound we would use a strong form of the

definite article 'the'. For instance, this date would be the 8th of July, 2019. There

are also two forms of the preposition 'of' and notice it's always pronounced with a

V sound, not an F , of, of. So the strong form would be the 8th of July, but

the more common weak form we will replace the 'of' with the schwa sound /uh/ and it

sounds like this, the 8th of July. The 8th of July. The

difference between the British English and American English forms of dates.

There is a big difference in the way Americans write the dates, the way they

display the dates. For example, this is an example of a British English display and

this second one is an example of the American English display, You'll

notice they list the month first and then the day, whereas Brits list the day

first and then the month. Ordinal numbers. So what are ordinal numbers? Let's

imagine you win a running race. This means your position is first and

the person behind you is second, then we have 3rd, 4th, 5th, continues and continues.

These are ordinal numbers. So they are just the numbers that we use for

putting things in order. Don't be scared of these numbers as they're very easy

to learn, and for dates you only need to know up to 31st. Many of these

ordinal numbers use the TH sound and I know many students find it difficult

to make. So as a quick revision. What you need to do is place the tip of your

tongue just behind your front top row of teeth and then allow air to pass through

and between the tongue and the teeth. It's quite a long sound, like so so. The

ordinal numbers are 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th

6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 11th 12th 13th 14th 15th 16th 17th 18th 19th 20th

21st 23rd 24th 25th 26th 27th 28th 29th 30th and 31st. How to say the days of the

week? Well, I've already created a specific lesson for this and I'll leave

a link right here. But let's quickly run through them. So we have Monday Tuesday

Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday. How to say the years? Firstly,

let's look at years before the year 2000. This year for example we'll split into two

it'll be 1985. This year would be 1975. Now what if the year is past the year

2000, like today's year? Well we have two options. We can either say this year is

2019 or 2019 and it's quite common to use a reduce form of the 'and' and to say 'nd'.

So, 2019 becomes 2019, 2019. Okay, so let's

practice our dates. So for instance, how do you think you say this date? Well,

there's two ways to say this day. It's either the 20th of December 2010 or the

20th of December 2010. Okay what about this date? Well, I think this one is the

1st of June, 1985. Did you get that one? Very good! Okay, let's do one more. Okay

two ways to say this. It's either the 3rd of May, 2019, or the 3rd of May

2019. So how well did you do? Let's see if you can tell me how you would say your

birthday in the comments below. If you enjoyed today's lesson make sure to give

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next class!