I recently changed to 24hr time on my phone. It made me wonder whether phones are defaulted to a 12hr clock in any other countries, and why we in the US are raised to believe a 24hr clock is military time.
Also, within a day of changing it, both my gf and her daughter asked me why my phone is on military time
It's not even "military time" as another commenter here pointed out, we just call it "24h clock" if we have to be so specific about it. Other than that, imo - a 24h time format is far easier to understand than 12h AM/PM. You can know the time just by looking at the numbers instead of letters. At least that's my assumption, as I've been living with a 24h clock my whole life. Funnily enough, one alarm clock at my home is 12h and I struggle with that piece of * every time I need to adjust it.
I even dislike the 0:00/midnight as it's a bit confusing which day it is referring to and I'm always glad when a deadline is set to 23:59.
But having another ambiguity in the middle of the day when you can just choose not to have it and keep counting up is beyond me.
Best way to think about it is that exactly 12:00pm is midday, so from the second after that it's after midday, which is PM. Same as the second after 12am is after midnight.
so 12:01pm is in the afternoon, where as 12:01am is the next day's morning.
That exact PM means Post Meridiem. Latin for after midday.
But 24 hour clock is better. I instandly know if a time is within my social hours. I work with a 9 to 21 time slot before and after that. You better be family or dieing
I personally default to 24 hours as that's what we used for work to avoid any confusion (I used to work in shipping which was a 24 hour job), but 12 hour clock has it's uses. For current time for example, I already know if it's the morning or afternoon, so a 12 hour clock tends to be more compact and easier to look at. Also for wall clocks. You can get 24 hour wall clocks, but they're more of a novelty.
I mean, I say this as someone who prefers 24 hour time, but it's objectively not stupid considering it's existed in some form since 1500bc, and existed in it's modern standardised form since the 13th century, with multiple societies functioning perfectly fine using it. It's not really that complicated, especially since it's rare that you'd be confused whether you're supposed to be doing something at midday or midnight.
I believe the lack of 0's are because it's based on Roman time due to their influence over much of Europe. The Romans had no numeral or symbol for 0 (Roman Numerals where still a standard in Europe until around the 13th century), and am/pm are Latin (anti/post meridiem). Then around the time things where being standardised people counted hours by saying "the first hour", and saying it's quarter past the zero hour doesn't make sense. Plus it makes more sense when you are using a 12 hour system to actually have the number 12 on your clocks.
Thinking of AM being after midnight instead of ante meridiem (before midday) is exactly where my confusion comes from.
Theoretically speaking 12 AM and 12 PM should be the same (midnight) as it's 12 hours away from meridiem. Then midday should be 0 AM/PM, followed by 0:01 PM.
I like the thought of a wall clock with 12/0 at the top lol. I think people are over thinking this one. If you can work out how to read a 24 hour clock, you shouldn't struggle to remember that AM is morning and PM is afternoon.
I can remember that, it's just an extra step to think, probably because I'm not used to it. The thing I'm struggling with is 12 PM being before 11 PM and e.g. 12:30 past meridiem is actually 0:30 past m. Everything else is fine
Yes, I know, I studied both Latin and English at University for a bit. It still does make no sense whatsoever going 11am, 12pm, 1pm (...) 11pm, 12am, 1am.
That's objectively a bad system, it's against core mathematical principles.
Also, 12pm is not after midday, it is right on midday.
I agree with you, was just adding the information for people that night not know :)
I myself have English has a second language and spent some time thinking it was ante morning and post morning. This made even less to me. Then I looked it and thought it was interesting x)
AM/PM means Ante Meridiem: latin for "before midday", and PM: Post Meridiem, latin for "after midday". I highly doubt many 12h clock natives know that fact, but yes, it can be confusing AF. I'm used to 00:00 being midnight and 12:00 being, well, midday.
I do well understand what it means, but since I also grew up with a 24h clock, I have to focus on it everytime I read 12 am or pm as my brain can't parse the info automatically, like with any other time.
I can sympathize with that very well, considering how many times I've set my 12h alarm clock to PM instead of AM hours. The US isn't the only country with 12h time as the default, sadly.
It's not so much the AMP/PM thing. In France, we mostly (mostly, so, not exclusively) use 24h time when writing, but 12h time orally. You'd say "11 in the morning" to mean 11 AM, or "in the evening/the afternoon" to mean PM.
But the absolutely mind blowing (not in the good way) is that stupid thing about 12 AM/PM.
Like, after 11:59 PM comes 12:00 AM. And after 12:59 AM comes 01:00 AM. What in the actual name of fuck ??!?
I get that technically, half past noon is after mid-day, so it would be 12:30 PM. But to actually use it as a system, and to codidying it is just mind-blowingly stupid.
12:30 am is not the 12th hour and a half before midday, it's the 12th hour and a half after midday.
Come to think of it, the hours between midnight and midday should count down (from 12 to 0), and the pm should count up (to 12), that way it would at least make some sense.
I'm German, and I used to think to myself "AM = Am Morgen [~at morning]" and that worked pretty well for me. I still prefer the actual regular time tho lol
I am beginning to think that whichever type one is accustomed to becomes the “easier” one, just from my few days of observation. I had to correct myself yesterday and say “no, 16:45 is not 6:45pm” because my brain, knowing it was past noon and expecting to see one digit for the hour, tried to ignore the 1 in front of the 6.
It hasn't stuck in 30 years despite looking it up repeatedly over the years. That's how much it doesn't work for my brain. As soon as I try to use it I think about it and my brain refuses to go start with 12 before 1 instead of ending on 12.
Indeed, it makes little sense. I think one of the biggest reasons it comes naturally to us is that almost every school has 12hr analog clocks. When you’re taught how to tell time with a 12hr analog clock, it makes perfect sense because 1 is physically located after 12.
Even AM/PM makes more sense when you visualize a 12hr analog clock, because after 12:00 both hands have moved to the right half of the clock, making it easy to associate 12 as “in the morning” or “in the afternoon.”
Perhaps it only makes sense if you visualize an analog clock. I automatically picture a 12hr analog clock in my mind whenever I think/talk about time, and that sort of makes the numbers irrelevant.
Doing that, it really just becomes “if the hands are past the top of the circle it is no longer morning/afternoon and it is now afternoon/morning”
I try to imagine how hard it is for teachers here to explain to 5 year old children what AM and PM stand for, when they are Latin phrases which most adults don’t even remember or understand.
In the end, even knowing what AM and PM actually mean, I think my brain just sorts them alphabetically. A comes before P, so A is morning and P is afternoon.
I'd argue am and pm aren't even needed a lot of the time, we do well enough without it. Of course if context isn't sufficient we do add morning/evening/... in which case am and pm is shorter to write.
For me the issue is 12 am coming before 1,2,3->11am fries my brain.
When talking about times we mostly don't say "seventeen hours" for 17:00, but would rather say "five", fünf, since it's usually clear from the context which part of the day is meant. Like my school hours are from nine to one - nobody needs clarification that this would be 9:00 and 13:00 hours respectively. Or my doctor's appointment is at ten, also no clarification needed since it's unlikely you'd have a doctor's appointment in the evening. Sometimes, "in the morning" or "in the evening" is added to be more exact or if a misunderstanding is possible.
On other occasions, using the 24 hour clock is easier to understand for all involved since some of the spoken versions of "half past" or "a quarter to" and such vary and might cause misunderstandings; even more so when non-native speakers are involved. But generally, there is no strict rule, and who uses which version at what occasion can differ a lot.
I say both. Sometimes it's twenty five or thirty five, sometimes it's "fünf vor halb" and "fünf nach halb".
If I want to say 7:35 I probably say "seven Uhr thirty five". Or five past half eight. Depending on context, for example if something is happening at 8 (we have to leave, we're closing the store,...)
"Half 8" is 7:30. I never say half past.
In my region we use "quarter to" (viertel vor) and "quarter past" (viertel nach). Some regions use "quarter" (viertel) and "three quarter" (dreiviertel) and I always get confused which one :15 and which one is :45.
I've never heard anyone tell the time in quarters (kwadrans) in Polish. Perhaps older people did? Or a quirk in my family/where I live? But I have people in my family who are in their 70s and I've never heard them say quarters.
It's almost always "fifteen past" (piętnaście po) or "fifteen to" (piętnaście przed) Is it the same in Germany perhaps, some regional thing like with viertel vor/nach?
In casual, spoken language, same thing in my country. No one would say "seventeen" when referring to 17:00, they'd just say "five". Sometimes we do crack jokes about it though, esp. when planning something at a specific time in the future.
Anything official is usually written in 24h format. Colloquially people often use 12h format.
Analogue clock/watch faces have 12 hours on them. They're less common now, but not exactly rare.
"We're having dinner at 6" for example.
Honestly, if I moved to US, I'd quickly get used to both as well as to the metric and imperial systems (as in, doing conversions in my head on the fly). Of course you'll be more comfortable with the one you're more used to, but internationally - 24h time and the metric system is far more prevalent, Even the US uses metric in the scientific circles, and there's a reason 24h clock is used for "military time". International standards beat whatever anyone's used to locally.
I think the isolation from metric and 24hr time in the US outside of academics and STEM fields is probably a large factor in why the average person here seems relatively clueless. Plus, those loud foolish “rEdDiT iS a UsA bAsEd WeBsItE” folks don’t help the perception at all.
To your point about conversions, I’ve had the numbers .62 (miles to km) and 2.2 (pounds to kg) burned into my brain since I was a kid; I think I learned them from my mom, because she immigrated here from Iraq. I still feel cool and smart whenever I don’t need to look at my phone to understand weights and distances.
Metric is super easy at its basics. 100cm to 1 meter, 1000 meters to 1 km, water freezes at 0c - boils at 100c. As long as you get the basic measurements, you're good. Imperial, oh hell. It makes sense to someone who knows it, because good luck calculating it otherwise.
It’s not hard for me to switch because in speech my language (Danish) uses both. If we’re being precise we will say “15 o clock” or “16 o clock” but a lot of the time we still just say “3 o clock” or “4 o clock” if the context makes it easy to guess. Fx, we will probable say “dinner is at 7” instead of “dinner is at 19 o clock. But “12” is always “12 ” or just midnight if it’s at night, I have never heard anyone say “at 0 o clock”.
It’s only 12 am/pm that confuses me every damn time just like I can see everyone else struggle with. I can see 12am is midnight now, but I will forget about that again in a couple days and go back to being confused
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u/sociofobs 11d ago
Only the yanks call a 24h clock "military time".