city at night

city at night

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Of the Clock



You really don't think about the peculiarities of your own language until you teach it as a foreign language.   When I was a teacher many of my beginning students in Spanish class thought that telling time in Spanish was difficult.  Now that I am giving English lessons via Skype to Alejandro's little nephew, Ezra, I am realizing that telling time in English can be even more confusing.

First of all, there is that bizarre expression "o'clock".  I doubt that most English speaking people even know that it is a contraction for "of the clock".  Up until the early 1700s people would say "It is eight of the clock."

Then we have so many different ways to say the time.  If it is 7:45 we could say "It's seven forty five", "It's a quarter to eight", or "It's fifteen minutes to eight".   Think about 8:05.  We can say "It's five after eight" or "It's five minutes after eight" but we are just as likely to say "it's eight O five".  I wonder if there is any other language that has our penchant for using the letter "O" in place of the number zero?  We certainly would never say "It's eight zero five".  Of course, once we hit 8:10 that letter O goes bye-bye.  We would never say "It's eight one O".

Why is it that when telling time we say "in the morning" and "in the afternoon" but "at night"?  It would sound odd to say "It's ten o'clock in the night".

All these quirks of our language came to my mind as I prepared a lesson for Ezra on telling time.  I wanted to at least expose him to the variations we use.  Even though he has studied English since the first grade, this was probably our most difficult lesson up to this point.  I had prepared a bunch of flash cards with different times on them.  He did OK, but, after going through about half of the flash cards, I realized it was time to give it a rest.  

"All right, would you like to learn another song?" 

 "Yes!"

"Twinkle, twinkle, little star..."









2 comments:

  1. :)

    I hated teaching time when I was in Korea. Most of the places I worked used regular US textbooks so when time came up in the math books, I shuddered.

    I vividly remember trying to teach quarter to and quarter after. Even trying to teach one quarter as in 1/4 of a circle didn't help. I gave up. Didn't help it used analog clocks. I don't even know if they knew how to tell time using an analog clock.

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    1. Toward the end of my teaching career there were students who did not know how to read an analog clock.
      I don't know if you remember back to Spanish I, but you were taught that after the half hour you should use "menos", to tell how many minutes minus from the next hour. According to Alejandro, they never use "menos" in Mexico. For example, five minutes to two is "cinco para las dos".

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