It’s time to talk about time

I’ve read that dates and time are one of the trickiest aspects to most languages.  It’s hard to imagine anything harder than verbal aspect, genetive plural and verbs of motion.   But let’s take a look and see just how tough it is to describe time on the hour in Russian.

Some examples come from В пути, written by Olga Kagan, Frank Miller and Ganna Kudyma.  This is the text book used for 2nd year Russian at UCLA.

– Который час? What time is it?

– Одиннадцать часов утра. 11 AM.

When you are describing the time it is right now, you use nominative case and the cardinal numbers.

1 o’clock would just be час.  Russians would never say один час. For two, three or four o’clock you use the genitive singular часа and for the rest it’s the genitive plural часов.

When you are describing a time in the future, perhaps in answer to a question Когда? or Во сколько?, use the accusative case with the preposition в.  For example:

Я приду в семь часов вечера.  Note that вечер (evening) is in genitive.

You can also use the prepositional case, which would be:

Я приду в восьмом часу вечера.

The question В ктором часу? illustrates the use of prepositional case.

In expressing how long an event occurred, no preposition is used.  For example:

– Сколько времени ты делал/а домашее задание по русскому языку?

“How much time did you spend on your Russian homework?”

– Я его делал/а два часа!

“I spent two hours on it!”

If you need to express the amount of time that precedes an event, you can use через + accusative case.

Я приду через час.

“I’ll come over in an hour.”

Лекция началась через два часа.

“The lecture started two hours later.”

Other prepositions used in time expressions are до (up to, before), около (about, around), после (after), с (since, from).  All of these prepositions require genitive case.   For these expressions, use the ordinal numbers (first, second, third, etc).

Я буду дома до четвырёх часов.

“I’ll be home until 4 o’clock.”

It should be noted that in these expressions, one o’clock is expressed as часа except after с, when it is expressed as часу.

You can state an approximate time by placing час before the time, like часа в четыре.  Около means very close to the stated time, but около could be as much as an hour or more before or after the time.

So if I wanted to say that I studied from 1 to 3pm I would say

Я занимался с часу до трёх дня.

Another couple of words that might come in handy are полтора and полчаса.  Полтора means 1 1/2, so if you wanted to say “in an hour and a half”, you could say “через полтора часа“.  The word полчаса means “half an hour”, so to say “in a half hour”, it’s simply  “через полчаса“.

For easy reference, I include the cardinal and ordinal numbers here.

Cardinal Numbers

один два три четыре пять шесть семь восемь девять десять одиннадцать двенадцать тринадцать

one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen

четырнадцать пятнадцать шестнадцать семнадцать восемнадцать девятнадцать двадцать двадцать один тридцать сорок пятьдесят шестьдесят семьдесят

fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one thirty forty fifty sixty seventy

восемьдесят девяносто сто двести триста четыреста пятьсот шестьсот семьсот восемьсот девятьсот тысяча

eighty ninety one hundred two hundred three hundred four hundred five hundred six hundred seven hundred eight hundred nine hundred one thousan

Ordinal Numbers

первый второй третий четвёртый пятый шестой седьмой восьмой девятый десятый одиннадцатый двенадцатый тринадцатый четырнадцатый пятнадцатый

first second third fourth fifth sixth seventh eighth ninth tenth eleventh twelfth thirteenth fourteenth fifteenth

шестнадцатый семнадцатый восемнадцатый девятнадцатый двадцатый двадцать первый тридцатый сороковой пятидесятый шестидесятый семидесятый восьмидесятый девяностый сотый тысячный

sixteenth seventeenth eighteenth nineteenth twentieth twenty-first thirtieth fortieth fiftieth sixtieth seventieth eightieth ninetieth hundredth thousandth