So, this is tricky. Iâm already not really proficient with numbers, but it gets even messier when you try to apply them. Telling time (and understanding when other people talk about time) is pretty important though, so Iâm going to try to write some stuff out.Â
So. The basic construction is Klockan Ă€r..... One can also say Hon Ă€r.... in some dialects because time is feminine, I suppose.Â
Klockan Ă€r tio. It is ten oâ clock. 10:00
Hon Ă€r fem. It is five oâ clock. 5:00
Wow, easy! Letâs get slightly messier.Â
Klockan Àr tio över tio. It is ten past ten. 10:10
Klockan Ă€r kvart över sju. It is a quarter past seven. 7:15Â
Klockan Àr tjugo över tolv. It is twenty past twelve. 12:20
Not too bad. Ăver is the preposition used with another number or kvart (quarter) to show how far past the hour we are. So far so good.
Klockan Àr fem i halv elva. It is ten twenty-five. 10:25
Okay. What? So, here we have the preposition i, which denotes minutes until a time (where över is minutes past a time). Then, similar to how in English one might say âIt is a quarter to sevenâ at 6:45, Swedish starts referring to the next hour...just, way earlier than we will. So fem i halv elva is âfive minutes until half-elevenâ.Â
On a duolingo thread I canât figure out how to link right now but is for the sentence HĂ€lften av sex Ă€r tre, user devalanteriel explains that:
I mean it as in en halv fisk = "one half fish". That is, it is not "one half" but rather that the fish is half. So halv is the same type of word here as if it were, for instance, the word "yellow instead": en gul fisk = "a yellow fish".
English doesn't really use "half" that way, however - typically, it would be "half a fish". So it sounds a bit awkward - but it's that way we do it in Swedish.
Anyway...I think that is what is going on here. Weâre counting to the half-eleven. Moving on.
Klockan Àr halv sju. It is six-thirty. 6:30
Klockan Àr fem över halv elva. It is ten thirty-five. 10:35
Okay, so weâve swapped to över again, because weâre counting the minutes past the half-eleven.Â
Klockan Àr tjugo i tvÄ. It is one forty. It is twenty till two. 1:40
Klockan Àr kvart i fem. It is four forty-five. It is a quarter to five. 4:45
Klockan Àr fem i tolv. It is eleven fifty-five. It is five till twelve. 11:55
Aaand back to i because, again, weâre counting how long until the eleventh hour.Â
So while looking up resources for this, I found this for testing your clock reading skills. If you wanna master it Iâd jump to nivĂ„ 20 and do hela klockan.Â
Okay so. Nu Ă€r det tre i halv tolv. I think Iâm stopping here for the night.Â