Daily lessons · Day 7 of 90
You finished this day
Time & days
Say when - times, today, tomorrow
Your final free lesson, and it completes the everyday toolkit: being able to say when. You'll learn to ask and tell the time, name the parts of the day, handle today/tomorrow/yesterday, and combine them into real arrangements. After today you can greet, introduce yourself, ask what and where and how much, order, and make a plan - which is a genuinely functional survival Japanese.
Telling the time
Hours use じ (ji) and minutes use ふん / ぷん (fun / pun):
Those three exceptions are the main hurdle in Japanese time-telling. Notice they use the *other* readings you met on Day 4 - し for 4, しち for 7, く for 9 - the very ones you were told to avoid when counting. Counting prefers よん/なな/きゅう; the clock prefers よ/しち/く. Annoying, but it's only three items, and they come up constantly enough that they'll stick quickly.
Parts of the day and the calendar
These pair with times to make a complete when:
Those prefixes are another reusable system, like ko-so-a. こん = this, らい = next, せん = last. Learn them once and they apply across weeks, months and years - こんねん / らいねん / きょねん. Japanese is full of these small productive patterns, and spotting them is what makes vocabulary growth accelerate rather than plod.
Putting it together
Combining time words is how you make an actual arrangement:
に is your fourth particle (after は, を and か) and it marks a specific point in time - しちじに (at 7). Note the difference from English: Japanese needs に for a clock time but drops it for relative words like きょう and あした. So it's あした しちじに, not あしたに しちじに. When in doubt: numbers-on-a-clock take に, words like “tomorrow” don't.
Carry over, from earlier days
Check yourself
10 questions. Nothing is saved unless you finish.