It’s Professor Dave, let’s learn how Italians tell time.
We just learned how to divide the year into months, and the week into days, but for any
individual day it is common to need to know what time it is.
This can be described generally, like morning, afternoon, and night, or more specifically,
with the official system of time that the world uses.
Either way, let’s go over some of the words and phrases you will need to know in order
to tell time.
As we know, each day can be broken into different sections.
First there’s alba, and then mattina lasts until noon.
Noon itself is mezzogiorno, which literally means middle of the day.
After that there is pomeriggio, and then sera, which is used until bedtime.
Once in bed, it’s called notte, and midnight is mezzanotte.
These words have plenty of applications, but certainly we will sometimes need to tell the
exact time.
This is pretty intuitive, but one thing Americans will have to get used to is the twenty four
hour clock, as this is used at the airport, train station, on TV, and other official reports
of time.
After twelve noon, instead of going to 1PM, the numbers keep going up to 13, 14, and so
forth, so to get the PM time, just subtract 12.
That means 17 o’clock is 5PM.
However, the system Americans are familiar with is also common in casual interactions.
The word ore means hours, so to ask what time it is, we can say:
Someone could respond to this question with a word, like mezzogiorno or mezzanotte.
They could also respond with a number, like: è l’una.
Notice that this is singular.
Other numbers require a plural article.
This can be taken to be a rough estimation.
If intended to mean precisely on the hour, we can say something like: sono le tre, precise,
or le tre in punto.
If there are some minutes to speak of, we just state the corresponding number.
In English we sometimes say things like a quarter to two.
Italians do this as well.
A quarter of an hour is un quarto.
So we could say: sono le dieci e un quarto to mean 10:15.
When it’s 10:45, we could say: sono le dieci e tre quarti, or alternately we could say
undici meno un quarto, depending on whether we prefer to add three quarters or subtract
one quarter.
If it’s the half-hour, we could say: sono le dieci e mezzo, which means ten and a half,
or 10:30.
We can also do this with increments of time that are not quarter hours, like saying: sono
le dieci e dieci, or sono dieci alle undici.
Let’s go through a typical daily itinerary for our friend Franco, from his perspective.
Now let’s see if you can do it.
Check out this clock.