こんにちは～ Sorry for missing out yesterday. Here's the return of the Japanese of the Day spot :) So I'll make it extra long today, ahaha...
Today we're going to talk about writing the date and time. This is the first time we're going to focus more on reading and writing than speaking usage in Daily Japanese!
Anyway, I'm going to point out how time is written in Japanese. It's quite easy to learn, but if you don't know about it when you're first starting out, you may be confused.
In Japanese, you can reference the time with punctuation symbols like you're used to in English (so 10/24 or 10.24 would mean October 24). You can also write the time of day off the clock with a colon like "4:45."
But you can also write date and time with the 漢字 kanzi/kanji (Chinese characters) to represent them. This also corresponds with the way you say them aloud. It is written like this often in Japanese, so you should learn how to recognize and read it early.
年 is the kanji that means "year."
月 is the kanji that means "month."
日 is the kanji that means "day."
時 is the kanji that means "hour."
分 is the kanji that means "minute."
Of course, these characters can mean different things when they're not used to write the time of day or the date. We're only talking about their meanings when using them to write the date and time right now. Also note that they can also be used to count time, so ７時 can mean 7 o'clock OR 7 hours. ２０日 can mean the 20th OR 20 days.
When writing time, you always write from big to small. So if you wanted to denote a certain month in a certain year, you would put the year first because it is bigger. In English, we commonly do the opposite (saying "March 2004" instead of "2004 March"). In English outside of the US (and sometimes in the US, too) we even do the entire date from small to big (24 October 1985).
In Japanese, you go from small to big... so Year-Month-Day-Hour-Minute.
To write them, you can still use Arabic numbers, however, so it's just a matter of knowing the order and which kanji corresponds to which. You place the kanji after the number. Japanese months are actually named by number.
Let's look at the aspects of today's date:
２０１１年 is how you would write the year (2011).
４月 is how you would write the month (April).
７日 is how you would write the day (the 7th).
I write the date by writing ２０１１年４月７日.
When you are writing vertically (top to bottom), you more often will write the entire numbers with kanji, like this: 二千十一年 to mean 2011. Either way, you always pronounce them the same way of course.
The time of day works the same. If it's 5:42, you can put the proper kanji after the hours and minutes to show the time: ５時４２分. You will more often see this when the time is written out as part of a sentence.
Another note about the time of day is that Japan uses 24-hour time. Japanese people understand both the 24 hour clock and the 12 hour clock (since circular clocks and watches only display 12 hours), but more often, you will come across 24-hour time.
What does this mean?
It means that the day starts at 00:00 (zero o'clock) at midnight, and continues counting hours until it reaches the 24th hour, which is zero again.
00:00 is midnight
05:00 is 5AM
10:00 is 10AM
12:00 is noon
14:00 is 2PM
21:00 is 9PM
23:59 is 11:59PM, and in one minute it will be midnight again, or 00:00.
As I'm typing this, my clock displaying 24 hour time says it is１３時１１分 . That means it's 1:11PM.
To reference AM and PM, you use the words 午前 gozen for AM (literally "before noon") and 午後 gogo for PM (literally "after noon.") Noon is called 正午 syougo/shougo (literally "exact noon").
You put it before the time, so 午後５時 gogo go ji is 5PM.
Lastly, I want to talk about the days of the week, since it will be helpful in reading calendars.
In Japan, the seven days of the week are named after astral bodies (from Roman astrology) and have corresponding elements (from Chinese astrology).
In Japanese, all days of the week end with the suffix 曜日 youbi, just like all days in English end with "day." Before the youbi is the name of the day.
Note that on Japanese calendars, the week traditionally starts on Monday, not Sunday. However, this is not always the case since a lot of websites and things have calendars originally made for a western audience first, then are just translated straight into Japanese without changing the look of the calendar. Stuff like that. Just look at the calendar and make sure you've noticed which day is listed first.
These are the seven days, starting with Monday:
月曜日 getuyoubi/getsuyoubi is Monday, named after Moon.
火曜日 kayoubi is Tuesday, named after Mars. Day of Fire.
水曜日 suiyoubi is Wednesday, named after Mercury. Day of Water.
木曜日 mokuyoubi is Thursday, named after Jupiter. Day of Wood.
金曜日 kinyoubi is Friday, named after Venus. Day of Metal.
土曜日 douyoubi is Saturday, named after Saturn. Day of Earth.
日曜日 nichiyoubi is Sunday, named after Sun.
When you see the day written, you will come across the day of the week written after it to specify what day it was. You don't have to write the full day of the week, just the kanji that tells which day it is. So if you see this:
２０１１年４月７日（木）
You know that the moku part written at the end means that the 7th of April in 2011 falls on a Thursday. It doesn't mean wood or tree or Jupiter :)
It's a big blog post, but reading the date and time is actually pretty simple once you get used to it. Try looking in newspapers for things that talk about when events happened and you'll see it come up a lot. Another great place to see it is release dates for movies and games and things.
Here are two of Japan's biggest newspapers' websites:
朝日新聞 Asahi
毎日新聞 Mainichi
You can look around and look for things with dates and time :) Even if you can't read Japanese yet, the current date will always be displayed on the main page, so see if you can find it.
If you look at Asahi's newest stories (at the top middle of the page, usually with red squares next to them), you will also notice that the time the article was posted is listed next to them. These are written in 24-hour time!
If you scroll down a bit in the middle of Mainichi's page, you will see a section called ニュースセレクト nyuususerekuto (News Select, or "news selection") that lists current articles. The times for these articles are written using the kanji and also use 24-hour time.
Keep an eye out for dates and times. You can even change your computer to display the date and time in Japanese :)
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