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Alex and Lena are waiting to go to the cinema.
German asks Wie spät ist es? — literally "how late is it?" Wie viel Uhr ist es? also exists and is a shade more formal, but wie spät is what you will hear. To answer, Es ist comes first and the time follows. The single most important thing in this lesson: halb drei is 2:30, not 3:30. German counts halfway TOWARD the next hour, where English counts half past the one just gone. Every English speaker gets this wrong at least once, usually while arranging to meet someone, and it is worth over-learning now. If in doubt, say the digital form — zwei Uhr dreißig — which is always understood and never ambiguous. German says its two-digit numbers backwards: einundzwanzig is literally "one-and-twenty", fünfundvierzig is "five-and-forty". English used to do this too — "four and twenty blackbirds" — and gave it up. German did not. It makes writing down a phone number dictated at speed genuinely difficult for learners, because you hear the last digit first. Practice with prices, which come up constantly.
How do I read these pronunciations? See the pronunciation guide.
1. Numbers, backwards
One to twelve are individual words: eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht, neun, zehn, elf, zwölf. Thirteen to nineteen add -zehn: dreizehn, vierzehn. The tens are zwanzig, dreißig, vierzig, fünfzig and so on. Then the twist — anything between takes the units FIRST, joined with und: 21 is einundzwanzig, 67 is siebenundsechzig. It is written as one word, however long. Note also that eins loses its -s in front of a noun, becoming ein or eine.
2. halb drei means 2:30
This is the trap. German halb points forward to the hour being approached, not back to the one just passed. halb drei is half an hour before three, so 2:30. halb neun is 8:30. Read it as "halfway to three" and it stops being confusing. Southern Germany goes further with dreiviertel drei for 2:45 and viertel drei for 2:15, which you may hear in Bavaria and Saxony but need not use.
3. nach and vor for minutes
nach is "past" and vor is "to", used exactly as in English: Viertel nach drei is a quarter past three, zehn vor vier is ten to four. Both take the hour as a plain number with no Uhr. For anything awkward, Germans fall back on the digital form: sechzehn Uhr siebenunddreißig, which is what you will hear announced at every railway station, since public transport runs on the 24-hour clock throughout.
4. Wann? and um
Wann asks at what time, and the answer takes um: Um acht Uhr. Do not confuse um with the other time prepositions coming in Lesson 6 — um is for clock times only. For a part of the day you use am (am Morgen, am Abend), for months and seasons im (im Mai, im Winter), and for the night in der Nacht, which is irregular and simply has to be remembered.
5. A first separable verb
anfangen means "to begin", but look at what happens to it: Wann fängt der Film an? The an has detached from the front of the verb and gone to the very end of the sentence. A large family of German verbs behaves like this, and it is one of the language's most distinctive habits — the listener has to wait until the last word to know what the verb actually was. You meet these properly in Lesson 7; for now, simply expect the loose piece at the end and do not read it as a stray preposition.
A. Fill in the Blank · Ergänzen Sie
Fill in the blank with a word from this lesson.
- 1.Wie ist es?late
- 2.Es ist drei.half
- 3.Wann der Film an?begins (er/sie form of anfangen)
- 4. Viertel nach drei.at (a clock time)
B. Multiple Choice · Wählen Sie
Choose the correct answer.
- 1.What time is halb drei?
- 2.How do you write 21 in German?
- 3.Which asks when the film starts?
- 4.What time is Viertel nach drei?
C. Word Order · Bilden Sie Sätze
Put the words in the right order.
- 1.Tap tiles below…
- 2.Tap tiles below…
- 3.Tap tiles below…
- 4.Tap tiles below…
D. True or False · Richtig oder falsch
Decide whether each statement about the dialogue is true.
- 1.It is half past three.
- 2.The film starts at 3:15.
- 3.Alex wants another coffee.
- 4.They have only ten minutes left.
E. Matching · Ordnen Sie zu
Match each German time to the clock time it means.
F. Translation · Übersetzen Sie
Translate between German and English.
- 1.What time is it?
- 2.When does the film start?
- 3.Es ist halb drei.
- 4.Dann haben wir noch Zeit.
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Five minutes early is on time
Punctuality in Germany is not a stereotype so much as a working assumption. If a meeting is at three, people are seated at three, and arriving at five past without a message is read as mildly inconsiderate rather than normal. The rule of thumb often quoted is that five minutes early is on time and on time is late. A dinner invitation is the one common exception — turning up exactly on the hour at someone's home can catch them still cooking, and a few minutes after is fine. If you are going to be late, the expectation is that you send a message, however short. Note also the academic quarter: a university lecture advertised for 10:00 c.t. — cum tempore — actually begins at 10:15, while s.t. means it starts on the dot. And the trains, which everyone jokes about, genuinely do run to the minute often enough that Deutsche Bahn publishes its punctuality figures and gets criticised for them.