You may be surprised at how often ‘time’ comes into conversation. If you see the time written in words, it’ll be the same challenge to you as hearing it spoken: you’ll need to be familiar with the language.
We’re so used to just looking at our phones for the time, that it’s easy to take this convenience for granted and forget some travel basics: in a foreign country, times won’t always be written digitally. Great – that means you’ll have the correct time on your person. You already have a firm grasp of time in English and you know you’ll need to reset your watch and phone to the local time.
Nine thirty o clock how to#
Table of ContentsĪs a traveler, your primary need for knowing how to read the hour in Dutch will be for transportation schedules: the bus, train, airplane, ferry, taxi… whatever you plan to use to get from A to B, it won’t wait for you! Fortunately, it’s really not complicated. DutchPod101 has all the vocab you need to fall in love with telling time in Dutch, and not a minute will be wasted. It’s fun, it’s informative and it’s a basic necessity if you’re learning the language – especially if you plan to travel. With that in mind, I’d like to take you on a journey into ‘time’ from a Dutch perspective. I feel that way about horses, my children, travel and learning languages. I love this quote from the book: “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” If we truly love something, we spend time with it and not a second of that time could ever be seen as wasted. In ‘The Little Prince’ by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the prince has a rose that he falls in love with, and he tenderly protects it with a windscreen and places it under a glass dome on his tiny planet. Well, poets and scientists may have their views, but in our everyday lives there’s the question of practicality, isn’t there? I mean, if you have plans and want things to happen your way, there’s a certain amount of conforming to the human rules of time that you can’t avoid. On the other hand, poets through the ages have written impassioned thoughts about time, depicting it as both a relentless thief and an immensely precious resource, not to be wasted at any cost. We sense an ‘arrow’ or direction of time because we have memories, but really time is just a construct that humans have created to help make sense of the world. In science, time is often referred to as a fourth dimension and many physicists and philosophers think that if we understood the physics of the universe, we would see that time is an illusion. In fact, time can seem rather capricious – going slowly, going fast, sometimes against us, other times on our side – like a force that has a life of its own. We have routines around coffee breaks, meetings, soccer games and vacations. From waking up and going to work or gym, to missing rush hour traffic on our way home, we’re always aware of time. As humans, our lives are filled with habits and schedules.
Understanding time in Dutch is an important part of your studies. What’s your relationship with the clock like? Does it run your day from a morning alarm to a cut-off chime for bed, or are you more of a go-with-the-flow type, letting your mood and emotions decide how much you fall in line with time?
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