Learn Phrases The Time

To ask what time something is begin your question with Um wie viel Uhr. Here is another example using this: ⁠Um wie viel Uhr fängt das Fußballspiel an? (What time does the soccer game start?). An example response to Um wie viel Uhr geht der Flug? is: ⁠Der Flug startet gegen 15 Uhr (The flight leaves around 3:00 pm in the afternoon).

To find out how long something is going to take, use the sentence pattern Wie lange wird + AKTIVITÄT + dauern? (How long is + ACTIVITY + going to take?). Here is another example: ⁠Wie lange wird das Treffen dauern? (How long is the meeting going to take?). You could also use the questions ⁠Wie lange dauert das? (How long will this take?) or ⁠Wie viel Zeit braucht das? (How long will this last?) to ask the same thing. A typical response would look something like this: ⁠Es dauert ungefähr eine Stunde (It will take about an hour).

All German-speaking countries use a 24 hour system to tell the time, instead of the 12 hour system that most English-speaking countries use. Because of this, you don't need to worry about saying "am" and "pm." Instead simply use the numbers 13-24 to specify that the time you are talking about occurs in the afternoon or evening. So, for example, in German, 9:00 am is simply 9:00 Uhr, but 9:00 pm is 21:00 Uhr. Note that 24 Uhr (midnight) is also commonly referred to as 0 Uhr, since the counter is set back to 0 at midnight. An example response to Es ist gegen 15:45 Uhr: ⁠Oh nein, ich glaube, ich komme zu spät zu meiner nächsten Unterrichtsstunde! (Oh no, I think I'm going to be late for my next class!).

This sentence is another way to say: ⁠Es ist 3:15 Uhr (It's 3:15). Viertel nach and Viertel vor are commonly used when telling time. Viertel nach can be used when you would say es ist fünfzehn Minuten nach…, while viertel vor is used when you would say es ist fünfzehn Minuten vor…. Note that another way to express viertel vor is drei viertel plus the next full hour. For example: ⁠Es ist drei viertel 8 (It's 7:45 am). You can also use kurz vor or kurz nach to mean 5 minutes till or 5 minutes after. There are endless ways to respond to a statement about time. A response to Es ist Viertel nach drei might look something like this: ⁠Es ist schon so spät? (It's that late already?).

The preposition um plus the time is used to tell when something is happening or going to happen. Here are some more examples to help demonstrate this: ⁠Das Spiel beginnt um 8:00 Uhr (The game starts at 8:00), ⁠Die Schule beginnt um viertel nach acht (School starts at quarter after eight), and ⁠Ich gehe um 5 Uhr zu meinem Freund nach Hause (I'm going to my friend's house at 5:00). There are many ways somebody could respond to a sentence like these. An example response to Das Abendessen ist um 19 Uhr is ⁠Ok, dann haben wir noch genug Zeit für einen Spaziergang (Ok, then we still have enough time to go for a walk).

Have you ever looked at your watch and suddenly realized that time has gone by faster than you expected? Well, then you could make use of this German idiom! The idiom most likely has to do with the speed of birds in flight, but it is simply just another way to say: die Zeit vergeht sehr schnell. A response to this might look something like this: ⁠Ja, es geht viel zu schnell! (Yeah, it's flying too quickly!).