grammar
numbers
Counting in Korean - Telling Time
Published 2025-03-24

Numbers: Telling Time in Korean (Part 1 of 5)

When learning any language, one of the fundamental things you cover is how to tell time. Today we’re finally learning how to tell the time in Korean! We’re going to use what we learned in the past couple of lessons to help us. Let’s begin.

First, let’s cover how to ask someone what time it is:

지금 몇 시예요?

What time is it right now?

몇 is a question word that means “how many”. You pair it with a counter to ask how many of something there are.

시 is the counter used to count the hour when telling time.

지금 means “now” and 예요 is the conjugated form of 이다 (to be), which we’ve covered in a previous lesson.

To answer the above question, we use native Korean numbers with 시 to denote the hour, then Sino-Korean numbers with 분 to denote the minutes. For example:

일곱시 삼십분

7:30

열시 오십육분

10:56

열한시 이십사분

11:24

You will also want to add a noun at the start to denote which part of the day it is, AM or PM, as most of the time you’ll use a 12-hour clock system. The word for AM is 오전, while the word for PM is 오후. Let’s see some example sentences.

오후 일곱시 반이에요.

It’s 7:30PM.

오전 열한시 이십오분이에요.

It’s 11:25AM.

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Did you know?

분 is also a counter for people. It’s the honorific version of the counter 명, which we learned is also a counter for people. You’ll often hear this at restaurants:

몇 분이세요?

How many people are in your group?

이세요 is the honorific form of 이다 used in question form. To review asking questions in Korean, review the lesson here.

When you reply to the above, however, you would go back to using 명. This is because we don’t use honorifics when talking about ourselves.

We will cover ordering at restaurants in a future lesson.


More ways to tell time: 반 and 전

You’ll often hear this:

오전 일곱 시 이에요.

It’s 7:30AM.

means “half”, and since 30 minutes is half of an hour, it’s common to simply say 반 instead of 삼십분.

There’s also , which means “before”. You can use this to tell time this way:

오후 한시 사분 이에요.

It’s 12:56PM (4 minutes before 1).

This is usually used when you’re almost (~10 minutes or less) at a new hour.

Even more ways to tell time: different time periods of the day

Instead of 오후 and 오전, you can also use more specific words to describe times of day, like these:

새벽 (dawn/~1-6AM)
아침 (morning/~7-10AM)
낮, or 점심 (afternoon/~12-3PM)
저녁 (evening/~5-9PM)
(night/~10-12AM)

We’ll put more complicated sentences together soon. Before that, let’s revisit the particle 에.

Using 에 with time

에, meaning “at”, is very often used with time to ask/describe at what time something happens. We covered it in this lesson.

Using this, and everything we’ve learned in this lesson, we can now talk about things like our daily routine! Like so:

Conversation Practice
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Informal polite:

신:

오늘밤에 뭐해요?

What are you going to do tonight?

서연:

밤 열시 반에 빨래해요.*

I’ll do laundry at 10:30PM.

*빨래하다 (to do laundry).

신:

몇시에 자요?

What time will you go to sleep?

서연:

열한시 반에 자요.

I’ll sleep at 11:30.

Wrap Up

We now know the basics of how to tell time in Korean! In the next few lessons we’ll learn more about telling time (weekdays/months, approximate time, to and from two times, etc). See you in the next one!

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Numbers: Counting Things in Korean (Part 4 of 4)