I’m not sure exactly how to cite that.
China, Japan, and Korea all use YYYY/MM/DD as their standard date format, so when the year isn’t specified the date format becomes the same as for the US. This is why, for example, one of the Korean names for the Korean War is the “6/25 War” (because it started on June 25th).
The dominance of American English in English education would also be a factor, no doubt.
I’m glad to see others in here mentioning YMD, because it’s the most logical and least ambiguous method. The other methods leave something lacking. The American system matches with how we say dates September 7, 2012 = 09/07/12, but it puts the numers in an odd order. The European system has the numbers in a logical order but then it’s inconsistent with normal ways of speaking. Even if you go to the full year, is 10/08/2012 October 8th or August 10th?
That’s where YMD works, and it’s not jsut 12/09/07, because that’s obviously just as ambiguous as either other system, but it’s 2012-09-07 (I’ll even do 20120907 at times). It has an even more logical order than the European method, ordering most significant to least significant, but it also won’t be confused with any other method because the first is obviously the year so it’s not MDY or DMY, and no one uses YDM. The most significant to least significant numbering is also great for sorting. For instance, when autogenerating log files or whatever, it creates a simple and unambiguous naming standard.
If, for whatever reason, that method doesn’t work, the simple solution is just to abbreviate the month to remove ambiguity. I work for the military and I’ll see stuff like 07SEP2012 and it’s a completely unambiguous and well ordered method that works well for the type of communication that caused the OP’s problem. I’m not as much of a fan since it does least significant to most significant and mixes in letters, both of which make sorting and all a bit off, but it probably works a bit better as human readable.
Either way, I hate both the American and European dating methods and would much prefer to see either of those methods used more often.
No! Use spaces! Please!
Ah, got it. I was stuck on thinking how doing something by the end of August was going to work with your mid-August deadline. 
I was gonna have a go at debunking this but given what I found in google when looking up asian dating, I may be a long time.
But if the person’s just directly adopting the military-style date cypher, then it does not use spaces.
No reason to do that, though, not in civilized society.
I wish you’d made this clarification originally. YYYY/MM/DD is logical in a way which MM/DD/YYYY is definitely not. (Deleting the ‘YYYY’ leads to ambiguity but that’s a separate issue – OP’s date had YYYY.)
In Thailand, FWIW, DD/MM/YYYY is the convention, according to my college-bound informant now waiting for me to relinquish our only Internet connection. 
I agree that year, month, day is the best way to do it. Best for computer sorting based on date, for sure.
Who gives a shit what works well for computers? Computers need to accommodate humans, not the other way round. DD/MM/YYYY works best because it lists from left to right the information most likely to be of interest to the person reading it.
The problem is that if you do it that way, when you sort the files, they won’t come up chronologically.
That’s why it’s useful to use Year - Month - Day.
So, it’s suitable for human eyes looking through lists of files.
Now I can’t stop thinking about what it means to date “American-style.” Is that where you buy a girl hot dogs and fries, set off some fireworks, then have sex in the bed of your pickup truck by the light of the moon?
Yeah, and if an American Embassy in Germany fucked up something like this I’m sure it’d be “those [del]fucking[/del] bloody Americans! Even when they’re in another country they still have to pretend the rest of world operates on their rules.”
Assuming you are talking about some international standard; the problem of the ‘European system’ is absent in most language. In most language I can think of, the normal ways of speaking use DMY, inverting this would be the illogical way to go.
Are you telling me they don’t? :dubious:
This organic unit has clearly not been fully assimilated.
I’m surprised no one addressed this issue from the OP:
Nazi? Hitler?
Also the metric system, military time and UNIX. But will they listen ?!
Fucking krauts. Even after the Americans saved their arses in the war they still can’t conform…
This made me cough up my coffee:), thanks for that:mad:.