How to Say the Date in German Out Loud
You learned that the third of May is der dritte Mai. Then someone says am dritten Mai and for half a second you are not sure it is the same date. It is. The day did not move. One unstressed letter at the end of the word changed, and it changed because of the sentence around it, not because of the number.
That is the whole difficulty with spoken dates, and it is a different problem from the one textbooks solve. They teach you to build a date. Listening means taking one apart at speed while the ending shifts under you. This guide covers the four forms you will actually hear, each with a real clip from the practice corpus. Every clip is the third of a month on purpose, so the day never changes and you can hear the ending doing all the work.
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The day is an ordinal, and its ending moves
German dates run day, then month, then year, and the day is always an ordinal. That part you probably know, and it is covered in full in our guide to spoken German dates. What that guide does not do is make you listen to the same day four different ways.
Ordinals are adjectives, so they take adjective endings. The stem dritt- is fixed. Only the tail moves:
| Frame | Form | What it is doing |
|---|---|---|
| der | der dritte Mai | naming the date: today is the 3rd |
| den | den dritten Mai | letter headings, appointments, wir haben |
| am | am dritten Mai | something happens on the 3rd |
| none | dritter Mai | read off a list or a form |
Four endings, one number. This is good news and bad news at once. The good news is that the ending never affects the answer: dritte, dritten and dritter are all the 3rd, so you can stop worrying about mishearing the day. The bad news is that all four differences live in a single unstressed syllable at the end of a long word, arriving exactly when you have stopped concentrating.
How to say the date in German: der dritte Mai
This is the naming form, the one you use when the date itself is the answer. It is what follows ist or war, and it is the form that appears with no year attached when everyone already knows the year.
In real speech it usually arrives as the answer to a question, which means it comes late in the sentence and after a run of words you were not listening to closely.
Die Einweihung war der dritte Mai.
Dann gibt es bestimmt bald einen Festgottesdienst. 03.05.
am dritten Mai: the form you will hear most
Whenever a date is a when rather than a what, German puts am in front of it. Am is a contraction of an dem, and that dem is why the ordinal switches to the dative -en. Appointments, birthdays, flights, deadlines and meetings all take this form, so in ordinary conversation you will hear am dritten far more often than der dritte.
English gives you a whole separate word for this, and it is stressed: on the third of May. German gives you one short unstressed syllable that runs straight into the number. If you are waiting for something preposition-shaped to announce the date, you will miss it, and the phrase will be past you before you realise a date went by at all.
Wir haben Balu am dritten September aus dem Tierheim geholt.
Dann ist ja bald sein Adoptions-Jahrestag! 03.09.
Use the ending as free information. That -en is not just grammar you have to tolerate. It confirms the am you may have half-missed, which tells you the speaker is scheduling something rather than telling you what today is. Hearing dritte against dritten tells you what kind of sentence you are in before you have decoded the rest of it.
den dritten: dates on paper and in appointments
The accusative shows up in two places that matter. The first is the date line of a German letter, which is written Berlin, den 3. August 2026 and read out as den dritten August. The second is the verb haben, which is how a lot of people ask and answer what today's date is: Wir haben den dritten Mai.
This is worth not over-thinking. For a listener, den dritten and am dritten sound almost identical from the ordinal onward, and the day is the same either way. You are not being asked to name the case. You only need to notice that a date arrived.
Dropping the article: dritter August siebenundsiebzig
With no article in front, the ordinal has to carry the marking itself and ends in -er. This is the read-it-off-the-page form: a date on a list, a birth date being dictated into a form, a record being read back to you. It often comes with a shortened year.
The shortened year is its own small trap. Siebenundsiebzig on its own is just 77, and you have to supply the century from context. The two full patterns for a spoken year, and where they split, are in our guide to saying years in German.
Der Wievielte ist heute? The questions that ask for a date
Dates rarely arrive unprompted, so it helps to recognise the question. There are three common ways to ask for today's date, and the useful part is that the question tells you which ending to give back:
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Der Wievielte ist heute? | Heute ist der dritte Mai. |
| Den Wievielten haben wir heute? | Wir haben den dritten Mai. |
| Welches Datum ist heute? | Der dritte Mai. |
Notice that Wievielte and Wievielten take the same endings as the answer does. The question is already telling you the shape of the reply. And when the question is wann instead, the answer will almost always come back with am, as in both dialogue clips above.
These question forms are the frame the clips on this page sit inside. The clips give you the answers, which is the half you have to decode in real time.
Where spoken dates actually come at you
- Appointments. Doctors, offices, viewings, and anything booked over the phone. Almost always am, usually with no year, usually said once and fast.
- Birthdays and birth dates. Both forms turn up: Er hat am dritten Mai Geburtstag against Sein Geburtstag ist der dritte Mai. Same fact, different ending.
- Deadlines and contracts. Bis zum dritten for a cut-off, where zum is zu dem and gives you the dative again.
- Letters and forms. The Ort, den 3. August line, and anything read back to you from a screen.
- Announcements. Events, opening times and closures, often with the date sandwiched between two clauses you also need, the same way train announcements bury a platform number.
How to train this specifically
Dates reward one narrow habit above all others.
- Listen for the stem, not the ending. Dritt-, viert-, zwanzigst-. Once you commit to the stem, the tail can do whatever it likes and your answer is already safe.
- Treat am as the alarm. It is the single syllable that says a date is coming. Catching it buys you the fraction of a second you need for the number behind it.
- Expect the year to be missing. Most spoken dates have no year at all. If you are holding a slot open for one, you will still be waiting when the next sentence starts.
- Practise the same day in different frames. Hearing der dritte, am dritten and dritter back to back is what makes the ending stop being a distraction.
Every clip on this page is a real question from the Zahlhaus corpus, the same audio the app uses for German numbers. If you followed them all at full speed, the app will push you faster. If any of them needed a second play, that is exactly the gap to work on.
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Start Practicing FreeFrequently asked questions
How do you say the date in German?
Day first, then month, then year, with the day as an ordinal: 3 May 1991 is der dritte Mai neunzehnhunderteinundneunzig. The ending on the day changes with the frame around it. Stating the date it is der dritte Mai, saying something happens on it is am dritten Mai, and a letterhead or an appointment uses den dritten Mai. The number itself never changes.
What is the difference between der dritte Mai and am dritten Mai?
Both mean the third of May. Der dritte Mai names the date, as in Heute ist der dritte Mai. Am dritten Mai says something happens on that date, as in Wir treffen uns am dritten Mai. Am is a contraction of an dem, so the ordinal takes the dative ending -en. For listening, the -en is your confirmation that the date is a when, not a what.
How do you answer "Der Wievielte ist heute?"
Match the case of the question. Der Wievielte ist heute? takes a nominative answer: Heute ist der dritte Mai. Den Wievielten haben wir heute? takes an accusative answer: Wir haben den dritten Mai. Both questions ask for today's date and both are common, so the ending you hear on Wievielte tells you which ending to give back.
Why does the ending on a German date keep changing?
The day of the month is an ordinal, and German ordinals are adjectives, so they take adjective endings. The stem stays fixed at dritt-, and only the last letter or two move: der dritte, den dritten, am dritten, and dritter with no article at all. The ending tells you about the sentence, never about the number. There is more on the pattern in our guide to German ordinal numbers.
Do Germans always say the year when giving a date?
No. For anything in the current year the year is usually dropped, so you hear just der dritte Mai. When the year does appear it is often shortened in casual speech: dritter August siebenundsiebzig for 3 August 1977, with no article and a two-digit year. Full formal dates with a four-digit year turn up mostly in official settings, appointments and birth dates.