6.7 Telling the time and making appointments — Epoché
What you will be able to do Tell the time in the two systems German uses: the timetable one — Es ist 16:30 Uhr. — and the spoken one: Bis halb sieben! Say the half hour correctly — halb fünf is half past four — which is the single commonest mistake an English speaker makes in German, and it puts you an hour out. Use the quarter hours, including the two regional systems for the quarters. Make an appointment and confirm it: Bis morgen um sieben. , Bis morgen im Büro. , Bis morgen früh! Prerequisites : 6.6 — transport, and 5.6 — the numbers. There is one thing in this lesson that matters more than everything else in it, and it is worth putting at the top: in German, the half hour looks forward, not back. Half past four is said as half five , because the German means half way to five . An English speaker who hears half five and understands half past five will arrive an hour late, and this happens to nearly every learner exactly once. Who is speaking to whom Both exchanges are between friends. The question carried over from 6.6, Wann fährt Ihr Zug? , is formal; to a friend it would be Wann fährt dein Zug? Appointments with a doctor, an office or a landlord are formal, and the vocabulary is the same — only the pronoun and the verb ending change. The two systems The official system is the twenty-four-hour clock of the timetables: the hour, the word for o'clock , then the minutes as a plain number. It is unambiguous and it is what you read. The spoken system uses twelve hours and the words for past , to , half and quarter . The words for past and to are the ordinary prepositions for after and before , and they behave as you would expect. The half hour does not. Clock Said Literally 4:00 vier Uhr four o'clock 4:15 Viertel nach vier quarter after four 4:30 halb fünf ★half five — half way to five 4:45 Viertel vor fünf quarter before five 4:10 zehn nach vier ten after four 4:50 zehn vor fünf ten before five Learn the third row as a single fact and rehearse it until it is automatic. The way to think about it is that German names the hour it is heading towards, not the one it has left. The quarters, and a regional split In parts of the east and south of the German-speaking area — including Saxony, Bavaria and much of Austria — the quarters work the same way as the half: a quarter past four is said as quarter five , meaning a quarter of the way to five, and a quarter to five is said as three quarters five . In the north and west the forms with the prepositions above are used instead. Both are correct and both are common, and the practical consequence for a learner is this: produce the forms with prepositions, and recognise the others. If somebody says three quarters five to you, they mean a quarter to five. If you are ever unsure, ask for the official form — nobody minds. Asking, and the day around the clock Two questions ask the time, and both are short. One uses the adjective for late — Wie spät ist es? , literally how late is it? — and is the commoner of the two in speech. The other uses the word for o'clock and asks how many of them it is: Wie viel Uhr ist es? Either is polite; neither needs a preamble beyond the word for excuse me if you are stopping a stranger. Around the clock sit the words for the parts of the day, and German divides them slightly differently from English. The morning runs until about noon; then comes the span around midday, which in German reaches into the early afternoon; then the afternoon proper, the evening, and the night. Each of these has an adverb form used without a preposition — in the morning is a single word — and those forms are how you say when something happens. A trap sits in the middle of this. The word for tomorrow and the noun for morning are the same word, distinguished only by the capital letter that German gives every noun. In speech they are told apart by position and by the words around them. For tomorrow morning German usually avoids putting the two side by side and says morgen früh , as in Bis morgen früh! below. Finally, the days of the week are masculine, take the preposition for on , and run from Monday: German weeks begin where the calendar does, not on Sunday, and a German calendar prints them that way. Exchange one — what time is it? Es ist 14 Uhr. [1] It's 2:00 p.m. Es ist 10.20 Uhr. [2] It is twenty minutes past ten. Es ist 16:30 Uhr. [3] It's 4:30 p.m. Es ist 20 Uhr. [4] It's 8:00 p.m. Every line here uses the official system, because that is what a clock face on a phone shows. Read them again and say each one in the spoken system as well. Exchange two — making an appointment Bis halb sieben! [5] I'll see you at six-thirty. Bis morgen um sieben. [6] See you at seven tomorrow. Bis morgen im Büro. [7] See you tomorrow in the office. Bis morgen früh! [8] See you tomorrow morning! The first line is the ordinary way to fix a time with a friend: the preposition for until , then the time. It is not a full sentence and does not need to be. The other three lines show the same construction with a day, a place and a time — which is how a German confirms an arrangement, and it is worth copying exactly. A word about punctuality, since this lesson is where it becomes practical. The German-speaking countries take an agreed time literally: an appointment at ten means ten, arriving at five past is noticed, and arriving at ten past requires an apology. For a private invitation to a meal the same rule holds — coming early is as awkward as coming late, because the host is not ready. The one setting where this loosens is a party, where an hour's drift is normal. The flip side is that the same exactness is offered back to you. If a German tradesman says he will come between two and three, he will, and a train timetable that says 14:07 means the seventh minute of the hour — which is why the delays mentioned in 6.6 are felt as a scandal rather than as weather. Word list Word (article, plural) Meaning Notes halb de half Gender / part of speech adjective / adverb How E