去年
qù nián
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Last year, the year before this one. Like other time words it goes before the verb: 我去年去了中国 'I went to China last year'. Here 去 does not mean 'go' but 'gone by, past'.
Năm ngoái, năm trước năm nay. Đứng trước động từ: 我去年去了中国 (năm ngoái tôi đã đi Trung Quốc). Chữ 去 ở đây không có nghĩa là “đi” mà là “đã qua”.
NounRegister: neutral
Examples
Editorial example (illustrative, not a corpus attestation) — awaiting a native-speaker check
Sources & notes
Hán-Việt bridge batch 064 (2026-11-14). Headword, Traditional form and pinyin checked against CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) source ↗ · Hán-Việt reading: Unihan kVietnamese source ↗ ; en.wiktionary Vietnamese entries via kaikki.org extract, snapshot 2026-07-31 (CC BY-SA 4.0): Hán-Việt reading 年 = niên · No Vietnamese entry is linked as its twin; the Hán-Việt reading is given character by character. Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Common questions
What does “去年” mean?
Last year, the year before this one. Like other time words it goes before the verb: 我去年去了中国 'I went to China last year'. Here 去 does not mean 'go' but 'gone by, past'. Literally: gone year
Is “去年” formal or informal?
去年 is generally neutral.