Russian · Chapter 4 · Lesson 16 · Grammar primer
Telling time
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification.
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 16 of 17 in this chapter