So, this is tricky. I’m 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 I’m going to try to write some stuff out.
So. The basic construction is Klockan är..... One can also say Hon är.... in some dialects because time is feminine, I suppose.
Klockan är tio. It is ten o’ clock. 10:00
Hon är fem. It is five o’ clock. 5:00
Wow, easy! Let’s get slightly messier.
Klockan är tio över tio. It is ten past ten. 10:10
Klockan är kvart över sju. It is a quarter past seven. 7:15
Klockan är tjugo över tolv. It is twenty past twelve. 12:20
Not too bad. Över is the preposition used with another number or kvart (quarter) to show how far past the hour we are. So far so good.
Klockan är 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 “It is a quarter to seven” at 6:45, Swedish starts referring to the next hour...just, way earlier than we will. So fem i halv elva is “five minutes until half-eleven”.
On a duolingo thread I can’t figure out how to link right now but is for the sentence Hälften av sex är 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. We’re counting to the half-eleven. Moving on.
Klockan är halv sju. It is six-thirty. 6:30
Klockan är fem över halv elva. It is ten thirty-five. 10:35
Okay, so we’ve swapped to över again, because we’re counting the minutes past the half-eleven.
Klockan är tjugo i två. It is one forty. It is twenty till two. 1:40
Klockan är kvart i fem. It is four forty-five. It is a quarter to five. 4:45
Klockan är fem i tolv. It is eleven fifty-five. It is five till twelve. 11:55
Aaand back to i because, again, we’re counting how long until the eleventh hour.
So while looking up resources for this, I found this for testing your clock reading skills. If you wanna master it I’d jump to nivå 20 and do hela klockan.
Okay so. Nu är det tre i halv tolv. I think I’m stopping here for the night.
