Half Past in Chinese: 两点半 Is 2:30, and 三刻 Is 45 Minutes

Chinese has two words that stand in for a minute number instead of saying it: 半 (bàn, half) and 刻 (kè, a quarter of an hour). They are short, they are extremely common, and they share one property that makes them hard on the ear. Neither one contains the digits of the answer. You hear "half" and have to produce :30. You hear "three quarters" and have to produce :45. There is nothing to count.

The good news is that between them these two words cover only three clock positions, and there are no exceptions to learn. This guide covers all three, with real Mandarin audio.

Countfu is Chinese numbers listening practice: hear a time in Mandarin, type the digits. Take the free listening test.

Half past in Chinese is 半, and it goes straight after the hour

The half hour is the simplest shape on the whole clock. Take the hour, add 半, stop:

Three syllables for a whole clock time. There is no 分 (fēn, minute) and no number after 半, because 半 is the number. The longer form 两点三十分 (liǎng diǎn sān shí fēn) is correct and you will see it written, but in speech 半 is the default by a wide margin.

It works the same on every hour, including the two-word ones:

Why the pinyin above says liáng, not liǎng: 两 is a third tone and so is 点, and when two third tones meet, the first one is said as a rising second tone. The word is still 两; it just comes out of a speaker's mouth as liáng. The same thing happens to 五点 (wú diǎn) and 九点 (jiú diǎn). Learn to expect the rise, or 5 and 9 o'clock will keep sounding like words you have not met.

It is 两点半, never 二点半

Chinese has two words for the digit 2, and the clock takes only one of them. 点 behaves like a measure word, and measure words take 两 (liǎng), so 2 o'clock is 两点 and 二点 is simply not said. If your ear still maps "two" to èr alone, every 2:30 in the world will arrive as a syllable you cannot place. The full split between 两 and 二 has its own guide; for the clock the rule has no exceptions.

刻 is a quarter of an hour, so 一刻 is 15 and 三刻 is 45

刻 is a quarter hour, counted forwards from the hour you just heard. One quarter is fifteen minutes past:

Three quarters is forty-five minutes past:

Look at what your ear has to do with 两点三刻. It hears a 2 and a 3, and the answer is 2:45. The 3 is not minutes and not an hour; it is a count of quarters, and the 45 exists nowhere in the sound. That gap between what is said and what is written is the entire difficulty of 刻.

There is no 两刻 and no 四刻

This is the part that makes 刻 much smaller than it first looks. Two quarters would be thirty minutes, but that slot already belongs to 半, so 两刻 is not used. Four quarters would be a full hour, which is just the next hour, so 四刻 is not used either.

That leaves exactly two shapes to recognise for the whole word: 一刻 and 三刻. Once you can tell yí kè from sān kè, you have finished 刻.

一点一刻 packs both 一 tone changes into four syllables

Say the 1:15 clip back and listen to the two instances of 一. They are not the same:

• 一点 is yì diǎn. 点 is a third tone, and 一 goes fourth before it.
• 一刻 is yí kè. 刻 is a fourth tone, and 一 goes second before it.

Same character twice, two different tones, one short phrase. This is not a special rule for the clock; it is the ordinary behaviour of 一, which changes tone according to what follows it. The 一 tone change guide covers the pattern in full, and 1:15 is as compact a demonstration of it as you will find.

两点三刻 or 三点差一刻: the same moment, two directions

2:45 can be counted up from two or counted down to three. 两点三刻 is three quarters past two. 三点差一刻 (sān diǎn chà yí kè) is three, short of a quarter. Both are standard, and both are 2:45.

Countfu's audio plays the counting-up form, so a 刻 time always names the hour you are already in. That keeps 刻 and 半 in one family, where the hour you hear is the hour you write. The countdown family, with 差 and 过, is the one where the hour has to be adjusted, and it is covered in its own guide below.

How to train it

Everything on this page fits in a paragraph, and none of it helps at speech speed. 两点半 is over in well under a second. There is no redundancy in it, no context to reconstruct it from, and no time to translate "half" into 30 and then attach it to an hour you are still holding in your head.

The fix is repetition with an immediate answer: hear a time, type the digits, find out at once whether you wrote 2:45 or 2:30, and meet the ones you missed again. Try these cold, answers after each:

• 七点半 (qī diǎn bàn) = 7:30
• 九点一刻 (jiǔ diǎn yí kè) = 9:15
• 十点三刻 (shí diǎn sān kè) = 10:45
• 十二点半 (shí èr diǎn bàn) = 12:30

If 三刻 still costs you a beat of arithmetic, that beat is what the reps remove. The target is for sān kè to arrive already meaning :45.

Related reading

• Chinese Time to the Hour: 差 and 过, and Why 八点差十五分 Is 7:45: the countdown family, where the hour you hear is not the hour you write.
• Telling Time in Chinese: Why 两点 Is 2:00, Plus 半, 刻, and 差: the whole clock system in one place.
• Liang vs Er: When Two Is 两 and When It Is 二 in Chinese: why the clock takes 两 and never 二.

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