I recently encountered 二〇一九年 in a book. How do you read this? Is it the same as 二千十九年? Read as にせんじゅうきゅうねん?
According to Microsoft Copilot there are two pronunciations
The standard one. This is the usual one to read years.
- にせんじゅうきゅうねん
The number by number which is useful for announcements, official readings or to avoid ambiguities.
- に・れい・いち・きゅう・ねん
The second one is how the book 「1Q84」 is read (it has furigana in romaji (furirômazi?) as “ichi kew hachi yon”.
Assuming you’ve copied that correctly… I’ve often seen the large circle used to indicate a blank space to be filled in by the reader, the same way we’d use an X in English.. I see it a lot in places where names or places are obfuscated (for example “The car company Ni〇〇an” or “The year 19xx”).
So I’d have looked at this and thought “the year twenty-something nineteen”. Kinda weird to use it on the hundreds digit though, that’s a wide range of possible years.
In this case, though, it means a standard zero, i.e. the whole expression means “year 2019”.