Express Time in Chinese

Notes :

When putting this in a sentence, it wouldn’t go at the end like in English. It would go something like this :

Sentence structure: Subject + time + verb / noun

This works for days as well. A while back I made a chart for days of the week, and months of the year so refer to that if you are struggling to understand.

我早上吃早饭。
[Wǒ zǎoshang chī zǎofàn.]
I eat breakfast in the morning.

Sentence structure: Time + subject + verb / noun

Different sentence structure, but essentially means the same thing. It’s a lot like the difference between “I ate breakfast in the morning” and “in the morning, I ate breakfast”.

明天早上我吃早饭。
[Wǒ míngtiān zǎoshang chī zǎofàn.]
Tomorrow morning, I will eat breakfast.

This second structure tends to be easier for English speakers to understand because it has a very similar structure to English. I would encourage using both equally and not to rely too heavily on one or the other

Also, when telling time, you would go largest to smallest. So 明天 is tomorrow, which is the biggest time unit, and then down to what time of day [早上] and so on. The order is: Year, Month, Day, Time of day, Hour, Minute, Second

There are specific times that you can use the above time names. They aren’t set in stone, but best to follow this guide

Again, I must stress. ROUGH estimates. It’s hard to explain. It’s like, you wouldn’t go to school at 【上午】 even though an English translation says that 上午 means morning. You would go to school at 【早上】。6ish to 8ish isn’t really “early morning” but English translations can be misleading because of this.