EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 09 Numbers and Time 53 / 600
(specifying the destination) just after the noun meaning train/bus/airplane:
Vlak za Rijeku odlazi u pet. The train to Rijeka leaves at five o’clock.
Autobus za Split odlazi u sedam. The bus to Split leaves at seven o’clock.
If you want to use more precise time, you can specify minutes:
Vlak dolazi u tri i dvadeset. The train arrives at 3:20.
Officially, Croatian uses 24-hour system, that is, 3 pm is 15:00. In schedules, and
radno vrijeme working hours, time is usually shown as 15:20 or 15.20, sometimes
with appended h. Sometimes, in handwriting, time is written as 15 20 , that is, with
minutes in superscript:
Colloquially, people would just use tri 3 even without telling is it in the morning or
afternoon.
To ask what the time is, use the following expression. It’s normal in Croatian to give
a quite short answer:
Koliko je sati? What’s the time? (lit. ‘How many hours is it?’)
— Tri i dvadeset. It’s 20 minutes past three.
— Šest. Six o’clock.
Such short, basic answers or short comments are very common in speech, and I will
explain them regularly. They are not impolite.
The word koliko is also frequently pronounced with stress on the first syllable
(koliko).
The word skoro can be used before any time (or more generally, any measure). For
example:
Koliko je sati? What’s the time?
— Skoro pet. Almost five.
(It’s interesting that Standard Croatian prefers another word, gotovo, instead of
skoro which completely prevails in speech and casual writing!)
It’s, of course, possible to ask when something will happen; to ask, just put the
following word to beginning of a sentence, nothing else is needed:
kad(a) when