“The future starts today, not tomorrow.” – Pope John Paul II
Okay, it doesn’t get smaller than this unless you want to move into milliseconds or something, and we’re not going to do that (Disappointed? Sorry!). Seconds are important though I’d say not quite as important as the other ones. Still, you’ll use them enough to make it worth learning. It’ll be quick. Just give me a second, okay?
Seconds
The word for “second,” which you can attach to numbers to talk about a specific number of seconds is:
a 秒
And, like I mentioned a second (har har har) ago, you can put this onto numbers. Like minutes, the first ten seconds set the tone for the second, third, fourth, etc, sets as well. If you know the first ten you know everything.
a １秒（いちびょう）→ 1 second
a ２秒（にびょう）→ 2 seconds
a ３秒（さんびょう）→ 3 seconds
a ４秒（よんびょう）→ 4 seconds
a ５秒（ごびょう）→ 5 seconds
a ６秒（ろくびょう）→ 6 seconds
a ７秒（ななびょう）→ 7 seconds
a ８秒（はちびょう）→ 8 seconds
a ９秒（きゅうびょう）→ 9 seconds
a １０秒（じゅうびょう）→ 10 seconds
a １１秒（じゅういちびょう）→ 11 seconds
Lucky for you, there’s nothing that’s really tricky going on here. All the counters are straightforward here (unlike minutes!). Go ahead and read through all these and recognize how simple the seconds are and try to remember them all before you hit the practice section.
Minutes And Seconds
Just like with hours and minutes you can do something similar with minutes and seconds.
a ３分３０秒（さんぷんさんじゅうびょう）→ 3 minutes 30 seconds
a １分半（いっぷんはん）→ 1 minute 30 seconds, 1 and a half minutes
a ２分１０秒（にふんじゅうびょう）→ 2 minutes 10 seconds
You can see how the patterns repeat themselves time and time again by now, I bet. This should all be fairly familiar by now, so let’s get to practicing it.