Months in German: All 12 Months with Audio

German › Vocabulary › Months

Updated August 2026 · Everyday German · 6-minute read · 🔊 every month has audio

This is the friendliest page on our German site. You already know most of these words — you have been reading them on wine labels and Christmas cards your whole life. What changes is the sound: the J becomes a Y, the z becomes a ts, and the stress moves. Learn where the stress falls and the whole calendar comes out sounding German.

All 12 months in German

The four that trip Americans up

Eight of the twelve give you no trouble at all. These four are worth thirty seconds each.

Jänner: January in Austria

If your family came from Austria — or from South Tyrol, or old Habsburg territory — the first month has a different name, and it is not a dialect word. Jänner is standard written Austrian German. It is what the newspapers print, what the government uses, and what your great-grandmother would have written at the top of a letter.

An Austrian will understand Januar perfectly. But saying Jänner in Vienna is one of those small choices that tells people you didn’t learn your German out of a textbook.

Saying “in January”: the five phrases you’ll actually use

Months rarely turn up alone. They come attached to a plan, a birthday or a visit. These five patterns cover nearly everything, and none of them require you to learn a table of endings — the word im does all the work.

Dates the German way: 24.12.2026

This one is worth more than the vocabulary, because getting it wrong costs you a plane ticket. German dates run day, then month, then year. So 3.5.2026 is the third of May, not the fifth of March. On forms, in emails, on train tickets, in every letter from a German office — day first, always, separated by periods rather than slashes.

Spoken, the day becomes an ordinal: der dritte Mai, the third of May, and “on the third of May” is am dritten Mai (ahm DRIT-ten my). The ordinals themselves live on our German Numbers page, which is the right next stop if dates are what brought you here.

The month names in your family’s old papers

If you have ever gone looking for a birth entry in a German or Austrian church register, you have probably met a month you could not find in any dictionary. German had a second set of month names — older, homemade, and tied to what was happening in the fields — and they sat in almanacs, family Bibles and parish books for a thousand years.

Charlemagne started it. Around the year 800 he gave the twelve months plain German names in place of the Latin ones, and although the Latin names won in the end, the German ones never quite died. His own list was not identical to the one below — his September was Witumanoth, “wood month” — but it began the habit. What follows is the later, tidied-up set that ended up in almanacs, family Bibles and parish books. You will not hear these spoken today. You will only ever read them, which is exactly when you need them.

One of them survived into ordinary modern German: Germans still call May the Wonnemonat Mai (VON-neh-moh-naht my) when they are feeling poetic about the weather.

The four seasons in German

Months come with seasons attached, and these four are short, useful, and easier than they look.

Herbst is worth a second look: it is the same old word as the English harvest. English kept it for the work and borrowed “autumn” from French for the season in the late 1300s; German kept it for the season. Two languages, one word, split down the middle.

Which ones should you actually learn first?

Not all twelve at once. Learn the four you personally need, and the rest will arrive on their own:

• The month you were born in. Say Ich habe im ___ Geburtstag and you have a complete sentence about yourself.
• The month you’d travel in. One sentence: Wir fahren im ___ nach Deutschland.
• Dezember, because every card, market and carol you’ll meet is in it.
• Juni and Juli together, with the Juno/Julei trick, because those are the two that cause real trouble.
• Jänner, if there is Austria anywhere in your family tree.

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