Once you can count in Japanese, telling the time is mostly bolting two little counters onto those numbers: 時 (ji) for the hour and 分 (fun) for the minutes. There are only a handful of irregular readings to watch — 四時, 七時 and 九時 — and once those are in your ear, you can read any clock face out loud. Here's the whole system: the hours, the minutes, half past, AM and PM, and how to ask what time it is.
Almost every time you'll ever say is built from these three pieces, in this order — hour, then minutes, then (if you want) the half marker instead of 三十分.
ji = "o'clock". 三時 = 3:00.
fun / pun = minutes. 十分 = ten past.
han = "half past". 三時半 = 3:30.
So 三時十五分 (sanji jūgofun) is 3:15, and 三時半 (sanji-han) is 3:30. Now the readings.
Take the number, add 時. The catch: three hours use an irregular reading (shaded below). They never follow the normal number sound, so memorise them as a little set — yo, shichi, ku.
| Time | Japanese | Reading | Time | Japanese | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1:00 | 一時 | ichiji | 7:00 | 七時 | shichiji ⚠ |
| 2:00 | 二時 | niji | 8:00 | 八時 | hachiji |
| 3:00 | 三時 | sanji | 9:00 | 九時 | kuji ⚠ |
| 4:00 | 四時 | yoji ⚠ | 10:00 | 十時 | jūji |
| 5:00 | 五時 | goji | 11:00 | 十一時 | jūichiji |
| 6:00 | 六時 | rokuji | 12:00 | 十二時 | jūniji |
The three to burn in: 4 o'clock is 四時 yoji (never yonji or shiji), 7 o'clock is 七時 shichiji (never nanaji), and 9 o'clock is 九時 kuji (never kyūji). These are the same trouble-numbers that go irregular all over Japanese, so the practice pays off elsewhere too.
Minutes use 分, but the reading flips between fun and pun depending on the number in front of it, with a couple of small sound-changes (ippun, roppun, juppun). This is the same kind of sound shift you meet with counters — it's regular once you see the pattern.
| Min | Japanese | Reading | Min | Japanese | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 一分 | ippun | 6 | 六分 | roppun |
| 2 | 二分 | nifun | 7 | 七分 | nanafun |
| 3 | 三分 | sanpun | 8 | 八分 | happun |
| 4 | 四分 | yonpun | 9 | 九分 | kyūfun |
| 5 | 五分 | gofun | 10 | 十分 | juppun |
A quick rule of thumb: numbers ending in 1, 6, 8, 10 double the p and use pun (ippun, roppun, happun, juppun); 3, 4 use pun too (sanpun, yonpun); the rest take plain fun. For "half past," skip 三十分 and just say 半 (han).
Say the hour, then the minutes — no "and," no particle between them. Add です to make it a polite statement.
To say a time when something happens, add に. Clock times take the particle に: 七時に起きます。 (I get up at seven.) See how に works on the particles page.
Japanese has no "a.m./p.m." after the time. Instead it puts a marker before the hour:
| Word | Reading | Means | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| 午前 | gozen | AM (before noon) | 午前七時 7 AM |
| 午後 | gogo | PM (after noon) | 午後七時 7 PM |
Two fixed points are worth knowing: noon is 正午 (shōgo) and midnight is 午前零時 (gozen reiji, "0 o'clock") or casually 真夜中 (mayonaka). Timetables, TV listings and digital clocks often use the 24-hour clock instead, where 7 PM is written 19時 and read jūkuji — exactly like our 24-hour military time.
A few small words let you be vague or precise about the time:
This pair catches everyone once. 時 (ji) is a point on the clock; 時間 (jikan) is a length of time.
| Japanese | Reading | Means |
|---|---|---|
| 二時 | niji | 2 o'clock (a moment) |
| 二時間 | nijikan | two hours (a duration) |
So 二時に二時間勉強します。 means "I'll study for two hours, starting at two o'clock." Same number, two different counters — keep them straight and the rest of time vocabulary falls into place.
The question word for time is 何時 (nanji, "what time"). It slots in exactly where the answer goes — Japanese doesn't move the question word:
And the answer is just the time plus です: 今、十時半です。 — "It's 10:30 now."
It all rides on reading numbers fast. The whole system is the number kanji 一〜十 plus a kana tail — じ, ふん, ぷん, はん. The quicker you read those kana, the quicker a clock face turns into words. The kana typing game flashes a character and asks for its romaji against the clock, drilling exactly that reflex into a combo chase.
Next steps: nail the numbers these times are built on, learn the days & months for full dates, or see how に and the other particles pin a time to a sentence.