Russian · Chapter 24 · Lesson 3 · Grammar primer
Telling time
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification - revisited.
The short version
Polshestogo counts into the coming hour, not the last
Half past five is polshestogo, half of the sixth, because Russian names the hour a clock time is heading into, not the one it started in. Every minutes-past phrase up to the half hour works the same way: pyat minut shestogo is five past five.
Seychas polshestogo.
Bez keeps the hour plain, not the minutes
Past the half hour the system flips: bez chetverti shest, without a quarter, six, puts the minutes in the genitive and leaves the coming hour untouched. Timetables skip all of this for the plain 24-hour clock: devyatnadtsat chasov dvadtsat pyat minut for 19.25.
Bez chetverti shest.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 13 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 3 of 10 in this chapter