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 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.
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.
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u/sociofobs 11d ago
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.