The year does not begin in January
The Chinese year begins at Chinese New Year, which moves between 21 January and 20 February. Someone born on 5 February 2024 is not a Dragon: the Dragon year began on 10 February that year, so they are a Rabbit. A calculator that reads the Gregorian year gets that wrong, confidently, for about fifty days out of every three hundred and sixty-five.
This one computes the boundary instead of assuming it. The rule is astronomical: the eleventh month of the Chinese year is the lunar month containing the December solstice, and the new year begins two months later — with a leap month inserted where the calendar needs one, which is roughly every third year. Everything is evaluated at UTC+8, because that is where the calendar is defined; a new moon at 23:30 UTC falls on the following day in China, and computing it in UTC puts New Year on the wrong day about one year in three.
Animal, element, and yin or yang
The animal is the well-known part and it is the smallest part. A Chinese year is named by a pair drawn from two lists — ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches — which together produce a cycle of sixty rather than twelve. The stems carry the five elements, each in a yang and a yin form; the branches carry the animals.
So "Dragon" is a twelfth of the answer. 2024 was a yang wood Dragon and the last one was 1964; the next is 2084. That sixty-year wheel is the unit a Chinese almanac actually works in, and the full table is here.
How two are read together
Three things, and the tool reports all three because any one of them alone is a horoscope-column answer.
- The distance on the wheel. Animals four apart form a trine — the strongest traditional affinity, and the same geometry the Western trine uses. Six apart is the classical clash. Three apart is a punishment, which is the hardest angle in the system and the one most worth reading properly.
- The elements. Wood feeds fire, fire feeds earth, earth feeds metal, metal feeds water, water feeds wood — and each element also controls another. Two people can share a trine and still have elements that grind, which is where the real nuance is.
- Yin and yang. A mixed pair is traditionally the complete one. That is a description of complementary tempos, not a verdict about who leads.
How this differs from the Western reading
Completely, and that is the point of having both on one site. The Sun-sign reading works from a position on a solar circle and changes every month. The Chinese system works from a year, so everybody born within a twelve-month span shares an animal — which makes it a coarser instrument about a person and a much better one about a generation.
They also disagree about what compatibility means. The Western wheel treats the hard angles as productive; the Chinese tradition treats the clash as something to be managed. Neither is a translation of the other, and reading both is more interesting than picking.