How to Tell Time in Spanish: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide

Even though it’s a very useful skill and excellent practice of numbers, learning how to tell time (la hora) in Spanish is sometimes skipped by self-learners and classes.

In this post, we’ll teach you many time-related phrases and vocabulary to communicate effectively when you’re llegando tarde (running late) or de camino (on the way). 

Contents

• The Basics of Telling Time in Spanish
• Half Past and Quarter Past/to in Spanish 
• Adding Minutes in Spanish Time
• Using Menos and Para in Spanish Time
• Spanish Vocabulary for Telling Time
• Time Telling Quiz
• How to Practice Telling Time in Spanish

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

The Basics of Telling Time in Spanish

There are three main ways to ask for the time in Spanish:

¿Qué hora es? (What time is it?)

¿Qué horas son? (What time is it?)

¿Tiene(s) la hora? (Do you have the time?)

Note that ¿Qué hora es? is the most common way to ask.

Then to tell someone what the time is, you’ll need to follow this formula:

Es/Son + la/las + [hour].

So if the time just happens to be on the hour, you might say:

And if you need to review your numbers, you can do that here. 

Now let’s take a deeper look at the components of this formula:

• Use ser, not estar. Though it may be counterintuitive, we always use ser to tell the time, not estar. Apparently, time is a permanent entity and therefore doesn’t want to be described using estar, which suggests temporariness.
• Singular versus plural. We actually only use es for one o’clock and all times between 1:00 and 1:59: this is because one hour is singular. Use son for two o’clock and beyond.
• Time is feminine. That’s why we say, “Son las seis” (It’s six o’clock), for example. Because time is feminine, you should always use las and la to describe time, never el or los.

Half Past and Quarter Past/to in Spanish 

Now that you’ve got the basics of telling the time when the clock strikes five (son las cinco), seven (son las siete) and eleven (son las once), you can move on to what happens when it’s half past, quarter past and quarter to the hour.

To say that it is half past the hour, use this formula:

Es/Son + [the hour] + y media/treinta.

Notice that it’s not y medio since hora is feminine.

To say that it’s quarter past the hour, use this:

Es/Son + [the hour] + y cuarto/quince.

Note that cuarto does end in o because it means “quarter” and the word is masculine.

Once you get past the 30-minute mark, you need to use menos or para and refer to the hour that is approaching, just like when you use “quarter to” in English:

Es/Son + [the hour approaching] + menos cuarto.

Es/Son + quarto + para + [the hour approaching].

Let’s look at some examples:

Adding Minutes in Spanish Time

To say any time between the hour and half past, this formula is the most common:

Es/Son + [the hour] + [number of minutes past the hour].

You can also tell the time with different prepositions in the following formulas, however they are slightly less common:

Es/Son + [the hour] + y + [number of minutes past the hour].

Es/Son + [the hour] + con + [number of minutes past the hour].

Using Menos and Para in Spanish Time

In English, when you get to the second half of the hour on an analog clock, you can start telling the time by how long is left until the next hour.

It’s quite forward-thinking if you think about it.

Spanish is almost the same as English in regard to this. We’ve also already seen an example of this with menos cuarto/cuarto para.

Here’s the formula for telling time with menos:

Es/Son + [the hour approaching] + menos + [minutes to the hour].

The formula for using para is similar, however we switch the hour approaching and the minutes to the hour:

Es/Son + [minutes to the hour] + para + [the hour approaching].

Spanish Vocabulary for Telling Time

Time Telling Quiz

Write these times in Spanish:

1. 1:05

2. 3:55

3. 11:15

4. 9:30

5. 9:00

6. 5:45

7. 6:50

Answer Key:

1. Es la una cinco.

2. Son las tres cincuenta y cinco. / Son las cuatro menos cinco. / Son cinco para las cuatro.

3. Son las once y cuarto/quince.

4. Son las nueve y media/treinta.

5. Son las nueve.

6. Son las cinco cuarenta y cinco. / Son las seis menos cuarto. / Son quarto para las seis.

7. Son las seis cincuenta. / Son las siete menos diez. / Son diez para las siete.

How to Practice Telling Time in Spanish

• Use online games. You can test yourself using this online game—or with this one or this one, which are time-telling games of various levels with reviews to test your newly learned skills.
• 
  Ask your Spanish-speaking friends to test you. To practice beforehand, try listening to Spanish podcasts or watching some Spanish videos. The language learning program FluentU actually has authentic media clips—covering everything from telenovelas (soap operas) to news reports—with interactive subtitles that show you how native speakers naturally communicate time (among other things).
• Integrate time telling into your regular life. Every time you look at your watch, phone or tablet in your normal English-speaking life, you could say the time aloud in Spanish. You could even set up an alert on your phone to remind you to do this, perhaps asking “¿Qué hora es?” until you get into the habit of doing this regularly. A more low-tech version of this would be to put a sticky note next to your alarm clock.
• If someone asks for the time, say it in both languages. Warning: this one maybe is best done with close friends, as strangers on the bus might not appreciate your bilingual time-telling skills!