Mandarin Chinese Weblog

Did you miss wishing your friends in China a Happy New Year? Want to wish them a happy belated new year in Chinese? Well, first a little background.

China is 16 hours ahead of California time. Yes, all of China. There aren’t different time zones like here in the US. To do quick math, take the local time, add 4 hours and then add another 12 hours.

Example: It’s 6:08pm now. So adding 4 hours gets us to 10:08pm. Now add 12 and you get 10:08am the next day.

So it’s already 2008年/nián in China now, but it’s still 2007年 here (read each digit of the years separately, “this year is 二零零七年”). So how can you wish someone a happy belated new year? Well, first, you have to remember that Mandarin Chinese is not English. For a lot of the language, you can do a word for word translation and the listener has the task of trying to guess what you’re trying to say. I told my friend 我晚点祝你”新年快乐/Wǒ wǎndiǎnr zhù nǐ “Xīn nián kuài lè.” He said “do you mean ‘I’ll wish you a happy new year a little later on,’ or ‘I’m late in wishing you a happy new year?’” So in the context of wishing someone a happy belated New Year (to differentiate this from wishing someone a belated birthday wish) you can use 给你拜个晚年/Gěi nǐ bài ge wǎn nián. Another, more formal way is to say 对你说声迟来的新年快乐/duì nǐ shuō shēng chí lái de xīn nián kuài lè. Broken down, this means “to you say a late ‘happy new year.’” 给你拜个晚年 is more “natural” though.

As a side note, I like World Time Server’s website for checking the time around the world.

So on which ever side of the International Date Line you are on, 新年快乐! or 给你拜个晚年!