◄Previous: 2.7.3 Au bureau de vente de billets

# 2.7.4 Telling the time

To ask the time, you say:

Quelle heure est-il? What time is it?

When telling the time, you use the expression il est…

For full hours:

Il est une heure.

Il est cinq heures.

Il est midi. It's midday.

Il est minuit It's midnight.

For half hours, you say:

- 3:30 Il est trois heures et demie.

For quarter hours, you say:

- 7:15 Il est sept heures et quart.

- 9:45 Il est dix heures moins le quart

For other sub-divisions you say:

- 8:05 Il est huit heures cinq.

- 9:10 Il est neuf heures dix.

- 11:20 Il est onze heures vingt.

- 14:35 Il est trois heures moins vingt-cinq.

To distinguish between am and pm, you say du matin (till 12 noon), de l'après-midi (till 4 or 5 pm), du soir (till 12 midnight).

When more precision is required, people give exact hours and minutes:

- 7.45 Il est sept heures quarante-cinq

## Activité 37

Écoutez et écrivez l'heure.

This browser does not support audio playback.

Audio 26
Transcript

Listen to Extract 64, in which various people are being asked the time, and write down their answers.

Écoutez et écrivez l'heure.

Exemple

1 h 15 une heure quinze

### Answer

1. 1 h 15

2. 11 h 30

3. 12 h 20

4. 14 h 00

5. 8 h 40

6. 2 h 45

◄Contents►Next: Section 2.8

OpenLearn - Beginners' French: A trip to Avignon
Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.