How do people in Germany or any other 24 hour format country tell the time?
I mean, do they say "I sleep at 9pm" or more like "I sleep at 2100 hrs" even while they are talking informally? 2100 hrs sounds very formal to me, but yeah, I was just wondering if they used 24 hour format for only official and government proceedings and used 12 hour format for casual stuff.
It depends. You might say something like "I've got a meeting from 12 to 14", which is perfectly natural. But also a lot of the time you might just say "I go to bed at 9" because the context makes it obvious that you mean 9 in the evening. Most people don't go to bed in the morning. Unless you do, but then you would probably give context "I'm going to bed at 9 in the morning, because I work nights", for example.
Wait till you hear how Japan does things. If something closes at 1a or 2a, quite often the signage says 2500 or 2600 instead of 0100 or 0200 to denote that it’s a holdover from the previous day.
It’s not an “official” thing and usually rolls over based on the business.
So let’s say one business opens at 10a and closes at 4a every day, they’ll say 10:00-28:00
But let’s say a different company opens at 3a and closes at 10p, they’ll say 03:00-22:00
You’ll notice that there isn’t an “official” reset of time, it’s only used when a business carries over past midnight till whenever they close the next day. You don’t really find anything going past about 4a though.
As far as I know, no one ever says "I sleep at 2100 hrs (twenty-one hundred hours)". We say "I sleep at 9 o'clock" or "at 21 o'clock"). Then of course change o'clock with your lagnuage's equivalent such as "uur" or "Uhr" in Dutch and German for example. Pm or am is almost always derived from context, and if it's not you can add "in the morning/afternoon/evening".
For me, it depends. 1700 Hours is definitely weird and military in my experience. But 17:00 isn't. The difference is how you write and say it. The first reads as 17 hundred hours, while the other is 17 o'clock.
In text Comms I use the 24h format but since I was a kid I learned to read the 24h in 12h format. I mean if I check the clock and it's 18:00 I won't think "it's 18 o'clock" but "it's 6 o'clock"
As a native English speaker that used to be able to speak decent German, the one that really screwed with me was 30 minutes past/to the hour. In British English (apparently, an American girlfriend found this confusing when I said it), you can just say "half eight" and everyone knows you mean half past eight. In German, "halb acht" would be 7:30, because it's assumed to be half to instead of past. Neither is more reasonable than the other, but it definitely took me a while to get over the instinctual understanding of it. I was very late to at least one lunch