If you’re serious about learning Spanish, it’s obviously vital to learn the days of the week in Spanish (días de la semana).
You’ll need it for describing what you did last week or planning for future activities with family and friends.
Just to give it a bit more emphasis, if you’re planning on working in a Spanish-speaking country, you’ll need to know how to reference days of the week in Spanish competently to arrange those essential meetings.
So, take a look at our quick guide to the days of the week in Spanish to become familiar with them if you’re just starting out.
The days of the week in Spanish are:
Espa~nol | English |
---|---|
lunes | Monday |
martes | Tuesday |
miércoles | Wednesday |
jueves | Thursday |
viernes | Friday |
sábado | Saturday |
domingo | Sunday |
One thing to take note of when you first look at the days of the week in Spanish is that they are not capitalised.
So, when you’re writing the date for school work, reports for work or in your personal diary, remember to not capitalise the day (or the months of the year while we’re at it).
You should also consider that when you’re writing the days of the week in Spanish for those professional reports and meeting agendas, both miércoles and sábado have tildes (or accent marks).
Not only should they be used for orthographic purposes, they also help you with the pronunciation of these words, letting you know where the stress and intonation of the word falls.
So, use this to your advantage!
You might already know that the Spanish articles — (words that mean ‘the’ in English) have either a masculine or feminine gender — el or la respectively.
When referring to a day of the week or describing an event that happened one day last week, you’ll need to use the article el for all of the week days.
To put it another way, all the days of the week in Spanish are masculine.
Here are some examples to help with this:
Fui al parque con los ni~nos el martes pasado.
El sábado pasado fuimos al supermercado.
To pluralise the days of the week, instead of saying el domingo, for instance, you would say los domingos.
This is the equivalent of saying ‘on Sundays’, or ‘every Sunday’.
This is particularly important when referring to a specific day of the week in a recurring sense — i.e. if you want to describe an action or habit that you do on that particular day every week, you’ll need to pluralise the article and the day of the week.
A couple of examples of this are:
Todos los viernes limpio la casa por la tarde.
Salgo con mis amigos todos los sábados.
An added tip that can help take your Spanish to the next level is to remember that if you use an adjective alongside a day of the week, it should complement its masculine gender.
For example, if you want to describe last Sunday as being a ‘fun’ day you should say:
!El domingo pasado fue un día divertido!
This rule applies to any noun and its gender in Spanish, which is another useful tip.
The adjective should always be masculine if the noun is masculine and feminine if the noun is feminine. However, there are some Spanish adjectives that have no specific gender.
If you want to use them alongside a day of the week, these adjectives don’t change. For example:
El lunes fue un día feliz.
El miércoles pasado fue un día triste.
Some of the essential vocabulary you should be aware of when referring to dates, times and days of the week are:
Espa~nol | English |
---|---|
hoy | today |
ma~nana | tomorrow |
ma~nana por la ma~nana | tomorrow morning |
ayer | yesterday |
el próximo lunes | next Monday |
el martes pasado | last Tuesday |
el mes que viene | next Monday |
el martes pasado | last Tuesday |
el mes que viene | next month |
hoy es… | today is… |
ayer fue… | yesterday was… |
In closing, here are two quick tips to remember:
Try these out to help you learn the Spanish days of the week.
To go a step further, take a look at our Spanish resources and online Spanish course recommendations.
Got any other tips for memorising the days of the week in Spanish?
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