A box with a line inside — the sun, squared up for easy carving!
Listen and practise 日 →Beginner character collection
Chinese Time Words
Learn beginner Chinese characters for days, years, times of day, hours, minutes, and everyday time expressions.
Why learn these Chinese characters together?
Time words help beginners move quickly from isolated characters to useful daily sentences. This collection covers the building blocks used for today, this year, morning, evening, noon, clock time, minutes, and half past. Several of these characters also have other common meanings, so context is important.
Study the characters individually, then read them as word families. 今 means the present or current time; 今天 is today, 今年 is this year, and 今晚 is tonight. The second character supplies the time unit: 天 is day, 年 is year, and 晚 is evening. Seeing that structure makes vocabulary easier to understand instead of treating every word as an unrelated translation.
What you will learn
- Recognize the characters used in common dates and clock expressions.
- Understand how short time words combine to create a more specific meaning.
- Use context to separate meanings such as 月 as “moon” and 月 as “month.”
11 characters in this collection
Open a full lesson for the story, historical forms, word building, example sentences, pronunciation, and animated stroke order. Use the practice link when you want the interactive version.
A crescent moon flattened into a box — still glowing inside!
Listen and practise 月 →One harvest cycle finishes, and another 年 begins.
Listen and practise 年 →Highlight the current calendar square: 今 means now or present.
Listen and practise 今 →See the sun at the start of the day and remember 早: early morning.
Listen and practise 早 →When daylight becomes sunset, the day is late: 晚.
Listen and practise 晚 →Place the sun at the middle of your daily timeline: 午 is noon.
Listen and practise 午 →Follow the sun through the day and think of measured time: 时.
Listen and practise 时 →八 separates and 刀 cuts: 分 divides a whole into parts.
Listen and practise 分 →Mark one point on a clock face: 点 can tell the hour.
Listen and practise 点 →Fold one whole into two equal parts: each part is 半.
Listen and practise 半 →Patterns to notice
Present-time words
今 marks the current time. 今天 is today, 今年 is this year, and 今晚 is tonight.
Parts of the day
早 points to early time or morning, 午 to noon, and 晚 to evening or late time. They appear in greetings and schedules.
Tell the time
点 marks the hour, 分 marks minutes, and 半 means half. 三点半 means half past three.
Common beginner confusions
- 日 can mean sun or day, while 月 can mean moon or month. The surrounding word tells you which English meaning fits.
- 时 is a general character for time or hour; 点 is commonly used after a number when telling clock time.
- 早 and 晚 are opposites in many daily expressions. Learn them as a pair to strengthen recall.
Try this 10-minute practice
- Say what time you wake up using a number plus 点.
- Build three words beginning with 今 and explain what the second character contributes.
- Write one short schedule using 早, 午, and 晚.
Continue with another beginner collection
Move between themes to reuse characters in new contexts. Some important characters appear in more than one collection because real Chinese vocabulary overlaps.
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