Ask and Tell Time in Mandarin Chinese

Knowing basic Chinese numbers will help you a lot in learning how to ask and tell time in mandarin Chinese. You are highly recommended to check out how to count basic Chinese numbers in Chinese.

Ask Time in Mandarin Chinese

In Chinese, when you want to know the exact time of the day, you can ask “几点了 (jǐ diǎn le) ？” “几” means “how many” or “how much”. “点” is a measure word for “hour”. “了” doesn’t have a specific meaning here, but when it appears at the end of a sentence, it indicates that a new situation exists. So, “几点了？” means “What’s the time?”

To make it more defined, people put “现在(xiàn zài)” which means “now” before the sentence, thus “现在几点了？” – “What’s the time now?”

If you want to ask time in a more polite way, you can add “请问(qǐnɡ wèn)” at the beginning. “请” means “please”, “问” means “to ask”. It may sound weird if translated literally as “please ask”. You can simply understand it as “Excuse me, may I ask…” So the whole sentence goes:

qǐnɡwèn xiànzài jǐ diǎn le？

请问，现在几点 了？

What's the time please?

Tell Time in Mandarin Chinese

To answer what time it is, the sentence follows this pattern:

xiàn zài shì...

现在（是）...

Now it's ...

You just need to fullfill the answer with the exact time. Now, let's get down to the main part: the time!

Keywords:

When telling time in Chinese, “hour” comes first, then the “minute” and then the “second”. Since there is no need to be precise to the “second”, most often people just tell what “hour” and “minute” it is in everyday life. Ways of telling time in mandarin Chinese can be classified as follows(You can tell the time in either of the 2 ways.):

Are you ready to do a quiz about the time?