A1–B1 time vocabulary everyday german offline
Time-Tap
Tap when the spinning clock matches the German time.
You hear or read a German time phrase and tap the clock that shows it, in two-minute rounds. A few minutes of practice can make familiar clock phrases easier to recognize.
Two systems. Formal/digital uses 24-hour Uhr-style readings: dreizehn Uhr fünfzehn (13:15), zwanzig Uhr dreißig (20:30). Colloquial spoken German uses halb, viertel, vor and nach: halb neun (8:30, literally "half to nine"), viertel nach drei (3:15), viertel vor elf (10:45), fünf vor halb sechs (5:25). Time-Tap drills both so you can switch between train-station German and conversation German on the fly.
Because in German halb counts forward to the next hour, not backward from the last. Halb neun literally means "half (way to) nine" - i.e. 8:30. This trips up English speakers for weeks because in English "half nine" usually means 9:30. The only fix is repeated exposure on a real clock face, which is exactly what this game gives you.
Kurz vor means "shortly before" and kurz nach means "shortly after" - both used colloquially for times a few minutes off the hour. Kurz vor zehn = roughly 9:55. Kurz nach fünf = roughly 5:05. Native speakers use these constantly, but they're rarely drilled in textbooks.
Rather than translating from English, look at a clock face, hear the German expression, and let your brain link the two directly. Time-Tap forces exactly that loop: the clock is spinning, the German phrase is on screen, and you have to commit to a hand position. A few minutes of practice can make halb, viertel, vor and nach easier to recognize.
Yes. The game works through five-minute intervals and the full range of expressions - formal 24-hour (zwanzig Uhr fünfzehn), classic colloquial (halb sieben, viertel vor vier), and the trickier ones like fünf vor halb sechs and kurz nach zehn. Early rounds stay on quarter-hours, which is the right starting point for A1 learners.
A1 to B1. The early quarter-hour rounds are perfect for absolute beginners meeting Uhrzeit for the first time, and the five-minute intervals with expressions like fünf vor halb sechs stay useful well into B1 - many learners still hesitate on those after a year or two of German.