5.3. USING NUMBERS 265
this time indication it is easier to tell to which day for instance a particular
programme belongs - something that’s airing at 1:20am on a Friday is actu-
ally airing ”Thursday, 25:20”, so still part of the Thursday planning. Going
back to actually telling time rather than remarking on the Japanese system,
the time format in Japanese is similar to the western system, namely first
listing the hour, then minutes, then seconds. For instance:
5:20’50”
”5 o’clock, 20 minutes and 50 seconds”As mentioned in the counters section, the a.m. and p.m. indica-
tions in Japanese are done using and , which precede the time
indication:
”(I) will come at 2:30 p.m.”There are two things to note here. One is that is optional. It can
be left out, in which case the statement is slightly less formal. In fact, the
whole / indication is optional, since typically it will be obvious
whether you mean in the morning or in the afternoon. The other thing to
note is the use of the suffix
which indicates ”half”. In Japanese, adding
this indicates an additional half hour (unlike in some western languages,
where the indicator ’half’ means removing half an hour from the time):
”7:30”This is of course the same as saying , but using is
shorter.
Unlike some western languages, Japanese doesn’t have indicators
for the quarters before and past the hour. Instead, it has a ”before” and
”after” marker if the time is anywhere from 10-ish minutes before the hour
to 10-ish minutes past the hour,
and
respectively. Literally,
means ”before” or ”in front of”, and is the noun derived from the
verb , ”to be past [some conceptual point]”. Two examples of their