I mean, do they say “I sleep at 9pm” or more like “I sleep at 2100 hrs” even while they are talking informally? 2100 hrs sounds very formal to me, but yeah, I was just wondering if they used 24 hour format for only official and government proceedings and used 12 hour format for casual stuff.
Wait till you hear how Japan does things. If something closes at 1a or 2a, quite often the signage says 2500 or 2600 instead of 0100 or 0200 to denote that it’s a holdover from the previous day.
Context makes it obvious. On the rare occations when it doesn’t, I usually add “in the evening” or “in the morning”
When people talk they speak in the 12 hour clock, but written communication is in 24hr
Can confirm this is the case in Spain, always spoken as the 12hr equivalent but written in 24hr
(in German) Both formats are commonly used in both cases.
Instead of 9pm I would say 21 o’clock (or in German 21 Uhr), if it is obvious I’m talking about the evening, I might also say 9 o’clock (9 Uhr)
The French say “14 heur”. It’s no biggie.
Depends. Some people will say “21 Uhr”, some people will say “9 Uhr”, one isn’t more formal than the other.
Of course with the 12h format you always need additional context to know if you mean in the moring or in the evening, since we don’t use “am/pm”.
I always prefer 24 uhr ;) format and usually set my devices to it, but I feel it is too formal to tell a friend, “hey, I will call you at 1700 hours”
24 uhr
That’s actually not a thing. It goes from 23:59 to 00:00
And when you’d say it it would be “23 Uhr 59” to “0 Uhr”.
If you really want to have fun with spoken German time formats, you have to get into the quarters though.
For example:
8:15 / 20:15 can be said as Viertel nach Acht (quarter past eight) or Viertel Neun (quarter nine)
8:45 / 20:45 can be said as Viertel vor Neun (quarter before nine) or Dreiviertel Neun (three quarters nine)
And I think the difference in those is regional, so those are actually more “controversial” then using 12 or 24h formats.
As a native English speaker that used to be able to speak decent German, the one that really screwed with me was 30 minutes past/to the hour. In British English (apparently, an American girlfriend found this confusing when I said it), you can just say “half eight” and everyone knows you mean half past eight. In German, “halb acht” would be 7:30, because it’s assumed to be half to instead of past. Neither is more reasonable than the other, but it definitely took me a while to get over the instinctual understanding of it. I was very late to at least one lunch
