NOTE! The the clock is experimental and may not work in all browsers.
The purpose of this page is to teach you the Norwegian way of telling time.
Use the interactive clock as a tool to learn some Norwegian by dragging the clock hands.
Saying time in Norwegian, and in related Scandinavian languages, is quite different to other languages. Only fifteen minutes past an hour we, optimistically, focus on the next hour and has forgotten the past! The logical explanation would be that we are already within the next hour.
In the spoken language Norwegians usually use the concept of a 12 hour clock. However, in the theoretical, and written, language the Norwegians use the same 24 hour clock as the rest of the world, meaning that midnight is 00:00, and noon is 12:00. Introduction of digital watches have made it quite common to write the time in numbers such as 15:30 (femten tretti), 06:10 (null seks ti) or 22:00 (tjueto). However, we are going to focus on the traditional Norwegian, and analogue, way of saying time.
The traditional, and most common, way of telling time in the spoken language uses a 12 hour clock. The Norwegian clock is cut into quarters, only the first quarter focus on the past hour:
When the minute hand is in the first quarter the focus is still on the "current" hour. When the minute hand is in the second, third and fourth quarter the focus is on the next hour.
When you ask a Norwegian for the time it would be acceptable if you say one of the following:
If the time is 14:10 it would be acceptable to give one of the following answers (in prioritised order):
