this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Shitty Ask Lemmy

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How do people in Germany or any other 24 hour format country tell the time? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I mean, do they say "I sleep at 9pm" or more like "I sleep at 2100 hrs" even while they are talking informally? 2100 hrs sounds very formal to me, but yeah, I was just wondering if they used 24 hour format for only official and government proceedings and used 12 hour format for casual stuff.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

If you really want to have fun with spoken German time formats, you have to get into the quarters though.

For example:

8:15 / 20:15 can be said as Viertel nach Acht (quarter past eight) or Viertel Neun (quarter nine)

8:45 / 20:45 can be said as Viertel vor Neun (quarter before nine) or Dreiviertel Neun (three quarters nine)

And I think the difference in those is regional, so those are actually more "controversial" then using 12 or 24h formats.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As a native English speaker that used to be able to speak decent German, the one that really screwed with me was 30 minutes past/to the hour. In British English (apparently, an American girlfriend found this confusing when I said it), you can just say "half eight" and everyone knows you mean half past eight. In German, "halb acht" would be 7:30, because it's assumed to be half to instead of past. Neither is more reasonable than the other, but it definitely took me a while to get over the instinctual understanding of it. I was very late to at least one lunch

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

As an American, the first time I heard this usage by a British person, I assumed it meant half an hour before the hour (7:30, in your example).