Knowing how to express time and dates is essential for daily conversations in Israel.

You’ll need these words to schedule appointments, catch buses, and make plans with friends.

This guide breaks down the exact vocabulary and phrasing you need to talk about time and the calendar in Modern Hebrew.

Asking for the time

To find out the time, you only need to learn a very short phrase.

The phrase for “what time is it?” translates literally to “what is the hour?” in Hebrew.

If you want to be polite to a stranger, you can add “excuse me” to the beginning.

Telling the time

When responding, you start with the word for “the hour” (השעה).

You then follow it with the correct number.

In Hebrew, hours are always spoken using the feminine form of numbers.

Here’s the basic vocabulary you need to tell time.

Israelis generally use the 12-hour clock in daily spoken conversation.

To specify AM or PM, you simply add the time of day after the number.

To add minutes, use the word “and” (ו - ve) for times up to the half-hour mark.

For times past the half-hour, you can say the next hour minus the remaining minutes using the word “less” (פחות - pa-khot).

Days of the week

The days of the week in Hebrew are very easy to memorize.

They’re based on numbers, starting with Sunday as “Day First” and ending with Saturday as the Sabbath.

Here are the days of the week in Hebrew.

In Israel, the workweek begins on Sunday and the weekend falls on Friday and Saturday.

Months of the year

Israel has a traditional Jewish calendar for holidays, but daily secular life runs entirely on the standard Gregorian calendar.

The Hebrew names for these months sound very similar to English.

Because these are borrowed words, their pronunciation is simply adapted to fit Hebrew phonetic sounds.

Saying and writing dates

Hebrew always uses a Day-Month-Year format for dates.

Here are a few helpful words for talking about the calendar.

When saying a full date out loud, you use the masculine form of the numbers for the day.

You then link the day to the month using the preposition “in” (ב - be).

When writing the date numerically in Israel, always write the day first, followed by the month and year (DD/MM/YYYY).