Chapter 10 · A2

Telling Time & Dates

Might help first: Ch. 9 — Numbers as Grammar: Cardinals, Ordinals & Agreement (a suggestion, never a requirement)

Telling time and stating a date both come down to numbers doing a very specific, rule-bound job — and both trip up English speakers in ways that have nothing to do with vocabulary. Spanish clock time hides a genuine singular/plural exception that English doesn’t have; Spanish dates are built in a different order than American dates and refuse to use ordinal numbers past the first of the month; and both draw on the cardinal and ordinal machinery from Chapter 9, Numbers as Grammar, which this chapter assumes rather than re-explains. By the end, you’ll be able to construct a full date, a clock time, and — since the same numbers show up here too — read a decimal or a percentage the way it’s actually written in Spain.

Core Pattern: Telling Time

Es la una vs. son las dos: the one exception to plural agreement

Clock time is built with ser plus a definite feminine article standing in for hora(s) (“hour(s)”) — and that article, unusually, has to agree in number with the hour itself. One o’clock is the sole singular case; every other hour is plural:

Es la una de la tarde.

It's one o'clock in the afternoon.

es (singular) + la (singular, standing in for 'la hora') — one o'clock is the only hour that takes the singular.

Son las tres de la tarde.

It's three o'clock in the afternoon.

son (plural) + las (plural) — every hour from two onward uses the plural verb and article.

Minutes: y, menos, cuarto, media

Minutes attach to the hour with y (past) or menos (to/till), with cuarto (quarter) and media (half) as fixed shortcuts for :15 and :30:

Son las cuatro y cuarto.

It's four fifteen (a quarter past four).

Son las cuatro y media.

It's four thirty (half past four).

Son las cinco menos diez.

It's ten to five.

menos counts backward from the upcoming hour — the reverse of how English structures 'ten to five,' though the resulting meaning matches.

De la mañana, de la tarde, de la noche

Spanish doesn’t use am/pm; instead, it tags the hour with a time-of-day phrase, and the boundaries don’t map exactly onto the English ones — tarde stretches later into the evening than an American “afternoon” would, and noche starts later than “night” often implies in English:

La reunión es a las nueve de la mañana.

The meeting is at nine in the morning.

Cenamos a las diez de la noche.

We have dinner at ten at night.

Ten at night for dinner is completely ordinary in Spain — de la noche covers hours an American speaker might still think of as evening.

Building Out: More Ways to Talk About Time

En punto, mediodía, medianoche, and the 24-hour clock

En punto (“on the dot,” “exactly”) pins a time down with no minutes; mediodía and medianoche replace the whole “twelve o’clock” construction outright. Beyond casual conversation, Spain also uses the 24-hour clock far more freely than American English does — on train and flight schedules, TV listings, store hours, and most official or written contexts:

El tren sale a las nueve en punto.

The train leaves at nine on the dot.

La farmacia abre a mediodía.

The pharmacy opens at noon.

El vuelo sale a las 18:45.

The flight leaves at 18:45 (6:45 PM).

Read aloud as 'las dieciocho cuarenta y cinco' or, more formally, 'las dieciocho horas cuarenta y cinco minutos.'

Nuance, Exceptions & Contrast: Dates

Building a date: day + de + month + de + year

A full Spanish date is built day-month-year, each piece linked by de — the reverse order of standard American month-day-year:

Nací el 3 de mayo de 1998.

I was born on May 3rd, 1998.

Literally 'the 3 of May of 1998' — day first, then month, then year, each joined by de.

The first of the month — but not “the second,” “the third”

Dates use cardinal numbers (dos, tres, cuatro…), not ordinals, for every day of the month except sometimes the first — the one day that can optionally take the ordinal primero, continuing the pattern from Chapter 9 where ordinals fade out past a very low ceiling:

Hoy es el uno de mayo.

Today is the first of May.

El uno, using the plain cardinal, is an everyday choice in Spain.

Hoy es el primero de mayo.

Today is the first of May.

El primero (ordinal) is also correct and common — the only day of the month where the ordinal survives at all in everyday use.

Hoy es el dos de mayo.

Today is the second of May.

Never el segundo de mayo — from the 2nd onward, only the cardinal is used.

Days and months don’t get capital letters

Unlike English, Spanish writes days of the week and months of the year in lowercase, except at the start of a sentence:

Nos vemos el lunes 3 de mayo.

See you on Monday, May 3rd.

lunes and mayo both stay lowercase — a common transfer error from English capitalization habits.

Reading years as one whole number, not paired digits

English often splits a year into two two-digit chunks when reading it aloud (“nineteen ninety-eight”). Spanish never does this — a year is read as a single cardinal number, however long it is:

mil novecientos noventa y ocho

nineteen ninety-eight (1998)

Literally 'one thousand nine hundred ninety-eight' — read straight through as one number, never split into 'diecinueve noventa y ocho.'

dos mil veinticuatro

two thousand twenty-four (2024)

Decades and centuries draw on the same cardinal/ordinal machinery from Chapter 9: decades are named with the plural of the tens-number (los años noventa — “the nineties”), and centuries are written in Roman numerals but read aloud as the plain cardinal, exactly like the siglo XXI example from that chapter.

Esa canción es de los años ochenta.

That song is from the eighties.

Numbers in Applied Contexts: Decimals, Percentages & Measurements

This closing section isn’t a new grammatical system — it’s the same number grammar from Chapter 9 showing up in a few more everyday formats worth being able to read and write correctly.

The decimal comma: 3,5 not 3.5

Spain — like most of continental Europe — writes a decimal using a comma, and uses a period (or a thin space) to separate thousands, the exact reverse of US convention:

El precio es 3,50 euros.

The price is 3.50 euros.

A comma marks the decimal point; where American English would write '3.50,' Spanish writes '3,50.'

La población es de 1.200.000 habitantes.

The population is 1,200,000 inhabitants.

Periods (or thin spaces) mark the thousands groupings — the opposite role from the comma's job in American numbers.

Percentages and measurements

Percentages are read with the cardinal number plus por ciento (or the % symbol), and — like other quantity expressions — the verb that follows often agrees with the noun the percentage refers to, not with the number itself:

El veinte por ciento de los estudiantes llega tarde.

Twenty percent of the students arrive late.

llega (singular) treats el veinte por ciento as the subject, though llegan (plural, agreeing with estudiantes) is also commonly heard — both are accepted in practice.

Spain uses the metric system throughout, so measurements built with these same numbers — kilómetros, kilos, grados, litros — follow ordinary cardinal-number grammar with no special agreement rules beyond what this chapter and Chapter 9 already cover.

Bringing It Together

La reunión es el 3 de marzo de 2025, a las nueve y media de la mañana; llegó el 20,5 % de los invitados.

The meeting is on March 3rd, 2025, at nine thirty in the morning; 20.5% of the guests arrived.

One sentence combining date order (day-de-month-de-year), clock time with y media, and a decimal-comma percentage — the full range of this chapter's applied number grammar.

Work through any time, date, or quantity expression the same way: identify whether you’re building a clock time (check es/son and la/las agreement), a date (day-de-month-de-year, cardinal past the first), or an applied number (comma for decimals, period for thousands) — each draws on the cardinal and ordinal rules from Chapter 9, just applied to a different real-world format.

Where to Go Next

This closes out Part I, The Noun Phrase — everything from here builds outward into pronouns and verbs, but the number and agreement grammar covered across this Part keeps resurfacing throughout the rest of the book.

Chapter 9, Numbers as Grammar — the cardinal and ordinal agreement rules this entire chapter assumes and applies; review there first if any of the agreement logic above felt unfamiliar.
Chapter 47, Impersonal Constructions — es tarde, hace + time expressions (hace una hora, hace dos años) extend the time-expression grammar started here into impersonal sentence patterns.
Chapter 3, Los artículos — the feminine article behind es la una/son las dos is the same article system covered there in full.

Ready to practice?

9 exercises · fill-blank, error-correction, sentence-reorder…