I recycled this book today, after having quite a bit of use for it over the years in my classes. You would not think that intermediate level English speaking adults would need training in talking about time, but it is not actually that easy.
Much of the work in English that people do is scheduling times – meetings, conferences, video calls, appointments, flights.
- Swedes use the 24-hour clock/military time. So dealing with people who use only AM or PM can be problematic unless they train beforehand
- When Swedes say half eleven in Swedish (halv elva) they mean 10.30. In order words they count half to rather than half from. Afrikaans is the same, so this was easy for me when learning Swedish. What was not easy is:
- Swedes use five to half instead of twenty five past, and five past half instead of twenty five to
Other issues that come with time are
- confusion between Tuesday and Thursday
- Swedes talk about the night to Tuesday when it is, for example 2am on Tuesday morning
- difficulty hearing the difference between thirteen and thirty
- biweekly can mean both twice a week and every two weeks
- using day after tomorrow, week after next, every two weeks, every other week
- fortnight (although I believe American English does not use this either)
- is next week the coming week or the week after that?
- if you are on holiday from the 2nd to the 28th, are you on holiday on the 28th?
- is a month a calendar month or a month from today?
- is a week a work week or a 7-day week
At least Swedish uses the same counting system as English, unlike Danish which uses vigesimal – counting in twenties rather than tens. Above 49, the numbers are based on the number 20. Ninety would be four and a half times twenty.
It doesn’t happen often but I have had some young people who cannot read an analogue clock. I am not sure why that is, because they tend to learn pretty quickly.
