“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” – C.S. Lewis
In general hours are pretty straightforward. It just takes some practice to get used to them and be able to use them on the fly and naturally like you’d need to. Some of that practice can happen here. More of that practice should happen outside of TextFugu. Whenever you need to check the time, try to think of the time in Japanese as you see it (will be better when you go over minutes in the next chapter). Learning to tell time comes mainly down toe experience, so you can force more experience upon yourself artificially getting your time-telling skills more natural in a quicker than usual amount of time.
Exercise 1
List off the time from 1 o’clock to 24 o’clock, saying them all out loud. If there’s any you’re not sure of, check the previous page after going through everything, see what you did or didn’t do wrong, then try again.
Once you’re able to do them in order, it’s time to recall them out of order.
Exercise 2
Make yourself some physical (*gasp!*) flashcards, one with each hour 1-24 on it. Go ahead and mix them up and flash them over and over again like a dude wearing a trench coat in the park. At first, focus on accuracy. Can you recall the correct hour? After you’ve done this a couple times, take a break for fifteen or so minutes. Then, try again, focusing on recall speed. You want to be able to come up with these hours in your head fairly quickly.
Do this for a while. Then, after your brain starts feeling full and throbby, put the cards aside. Tomorrow, though, I want you to do the same thing again until you’re able to get through all of them in under a minute. I imagine this will take a day or three or seven, but it will help immensely with the next chapter. You can move on even if you’re not able to do it under a minute, though make sure you continue working on it.
Exercise 3
Now it’s time to see if you can read and translate these sentences. Give it a shot, trying to understandwhy the sentences work rather than memorizing the sentences themselves.
a 今何時ですか？
What time is it now?
a 今は３時だ。
Right now it’s 3 o’clock
a 明日午前７時に会いましょう？
Let’s meet tomorrow at 7am?
a 午後８時に出る。
I’ll/We’ll leave at 8pm.
a 明日５時まで起きてね。
Wake up tomorrow at 5, okay?
a 私は毎日１時間日本語を勉強します。
I study Japanese for 1 hour every day.
When all of those make a good amount of sense to you, go through them again this time coming up with your own variations on them, changing one or two things at a time. This should help you to think more for yourself, allowing you to come up with your own sentences more effectively moving forward.
Exercise 4
For this Lang-8 post, I want you to write about your normal day. What time do you do everything? For how long do you do it? This should cover plenty of hour-based practice if you do it right (that’s the goal, so do it!).
Also be sure to pull in some of the corrections you got in previous journal entries. Can you get better than before?