5 Ways to Tell Time in English

If you’re traveling to a place where English isn’t the primary language, or if you just want to expand your horizons, learning how to tell time in another language can be extremely useful, if not essential. There are many ways to say different parts of the time in English, so it can be tricky to master. Here are five ways you can tell time in English that will help you navigate any encounter with timekeeping – no matter where you are!

1) Use Numbers

Time is pretty easy to understand when it's based on numbers. Once you get the hang of reading clocks, telling time should be a cinch. A popular system in many countries is the 24-hour clock, where you represent time using three numbers: hours, minutes and seconds. So 8pm would be written as 19:00 (or 7pm if you're American). For example, 8am would be 08:00 and noon would be 12:00. But what about morning or night?

2) Make Them Adjectives

These are five ways you can tell time:

1. Asking someone - 'What time is it?' 

2. Looking at the clock face - 'The hour hand is on the 4' 

3. Looking at a digital clock - '8:37 PM' 

4. Noticing natural clues - There's no more sun outside, so it must be past sunset. It has to be nighttime now, right?

3) Take Advantage of Words That Have Time as Part of Their Meaning

Here are some words with time as part of their meaning and the time that they imply: late, after, soon, before. Use these words to check your understanding of telling time or fill in the blanks for telling a story about what happened at specific times.

4) Add The Word O'clock To Other Nouns

Instead of using am/pm, we use 24-hour time. For example, 6:00 pm is 1800 hours. Use am and pm only if you want to say something like It's nine o'clock in the morning.

One way to tell time is by using numbers alone. The zero stands for twelve o'clock at night. Twelve o'clock at night is written as 0000 hours, with zeros filling the rest of the clock.

5) Learn Some Special Expressions

Now that you know how to read the time, it's time to learn some expressions for telling the time. This is often used when someone wishes another person a good night, or wishes that another person would hurry up and arrive at an event. In other words, this expression conveys the idea of wishful thinking. For example: I hope he comes home soon or We wish you were here.