Level 1 / Lesson 7: Telling Time
안녕하세요! Hey everyone! Some time ago I posted a vocab list about time-related words (things like morning, afternoon, etc.), but I realized I never put out a lesson about actually telling time, so that’s what this lesson is all about! Before getting into it, you should be familiar with the native and Sino-Korean number systems – check out my lesson about those here if you haven’t!
Also, I have a post about telling time on my Instagram! Check it out here! Let’s start!
First off, if you want to ask “what time is it?” in Korean, you can say “몇 시예요?” To be a little more specific, you can say “지금 몇 시예요?” meaning “what time is it right now?”
Let’s learn how to simply say the basic hours in Korean, as in one o’clock, two o’clock, etc. To do so, you would use the native Korean number system. Notice how some of the numbers are a little different – that’s just for the sake of easier pronunciation. After each number, add 시, which mean “o’clock” in this case:
So, you could say 지금은 9시예요, meaning “it’s 9 o’clock right now,” or 7시에 시작돼요, meaning “it starts at 7 o’clock,” for instance.
Minutes, on the other hand, use the Sino-Korean number system. Simply say whatever number of minutes you’re talking about, and add 분 on the end, meaning “minutes” after the hour For example:
If you want to say something like 8:30, you can say the following:
반 means “half,” so this is like how we say “half past 8″ in English.
You might be wondering if people in Korea use the 24 hour clock – in a lot of K-dramas, the character’s phones will say something like 17:00 instead of 5:00 p.m. According to 90daykorean.com, however, you will typically hear people say “it is 5 p.m.” rather than “it is 17 o’clock.” So here’s how you say that!
오전 = AM (literally “before noon”)
오전 열시에 영어 수업이 있어요. = I have English class at 10 a.m.
오후 = PM (literally “after noon”)
저는 오후 여섯시에 자요. = I go to bed at 6 p.m.
Here are some charts to summarize all of this!
Talking about Elapsed Time
If you want to say something like “I drove for 5 hours,” you would attach 시간 to the native Korean number and 분 to the Sino-Korean number. For example:
저는 다섯 시간 동안 운전했어요. = I drove for five hours.
동안 means “during” and can be used for talking about time frames like in this sentence, even if it doesn’t necessarily translate to “during.”
한 시간 걸려요. = It takes one hour.
두 시간 반 동안 읽었어요. = I read for two and a half hours.
(inspired by sentences on Naver Dictionary) 여기서 자동차로 서울까지 세 시간 이십분 걸려요. = It takes 3 hours and 20 minutes from here to Seoul by car.
That’s about it for this lesson! If you want to practice writing and reading Korean with others, join my Discord chat here and my Tumblr chat here! Don’t forget to follow me on Instagram too!
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