Prepositions of Time IN, ON and AT and Speaking about DAYS and CALENDARS in English

everybody chris amerikos here and welcome to another video this video is all about the days of the week weeks of the year the calendar and how to understand these strange things that english speakers do and say [Music] and i'm gonna answer important questions like does the week start on monday or sunday hmm have you ever thought about that before well if you look at an american calendar it will start on sunday usually and in other places in the world the week starts on monday why we're going to talk about that and more in this video most people think that there are 52 weeks in a year but some years there are actually 53 weeks and we have this strange thing called a leap year a leap year is a year when we have one extra day it's at the end of the month of february february 29th and it's a leap year if we have this extra day and a lot of people call this day a leap day and really this goes back a long time before english speakers goes back to the beginning of human civilization a place called mesopotamia and in mesopotamia they started counting days and time and creating a system so that people could understand when they needed to do things so they didn't have a lot of scientific knowledge at that time and they looked up in the sky and they could see with their naked eye they could see the moon the sun mercury the planet mercury the planet venus the planet mars the planet saturn and the planet jupiter and because they could see these different planets they thought that these were like gods that were moving around in the sky stars stayed in the same place but these planets and these bodies they moved around so at some point in history people connected things in the sky with religion and they also connected things in the sky with days of the week that's why monday in english actually comes from the word moon and it should be moon day and in many other languages there is the same word or a similar word for moon in the word monday now sunday you can probably guess what this day was named after and even in ancient egypt they had a sunday or day of the sun god in english we talk about the egyptian sun god whose name was ra and so they had a raw day but in english we have a sun day and this tradition carried down from mesopotamia to different people to egypt to the romans and greeks and this tradition was carried on so each day of the week is connected to one of these planets or celestial bodies and the sun and the moon we talked about those days but what about tuesday well english has a lot of words that come from the vikings and the vikings had a language called norse and there were a lot of different norse gods and tuesday actually comes from the name of one of the norse gods and the same with wednesday thursday and friday saturday comes from the name of the planet saturn so you can see that religion and planets were connected and then planets and religion and days of the week were also connected and when you see a calendar that starts with sunday that's because it's been influenced by religion in some languages where religion might be a little less important the language hasn't been influenced so much and the days of the week are maybe not related directly to a god and in some languages we can see that by the names of the days of the week and in those places usually the week starts on monday not sunday but how do you talk about time and days and months in english because sometimes it's really confusing should we say in or at or on well there are some simple rules that we can follow if the time that we're talking about is shorter than one day if it's less than one day then usually we will say at if the time that we're talking about is one day then usually we'll say on and if the time that we're talking about is more than one day then usually we'll say in for example the event happens at two o'clock or the event happens on the second day of the month or the event happens in march so all of these different phrases talk about a different time period and bigger time periods more than one day use the word in less than one day at and if it's just one day we say on now that's a very basic rule but it should help you understand how it works in general but there are a lot of special phrases that don't follow this rule so this rule really only works about 80 percent of the time we have special phrases like in the morning in the evening in the afternoon these are periods of time that are shorter than one day but we say in and we also say at night and this can be confusing for people too because it's in the morning in the afternoon in the evening but at night why well let's talk about day and night in english day has at least two different meanings because a day can be just 24 hours but day can also be the time during the 24 hours when there's light we have day and we have night right so the first meeting of day is 24 hours the second meaning of day is the part of those 24 hours where it's light outside and the dark part of the 24 hours is called night then we also have four ways that we can think about the day we have morning afternoon evening and night so the words day and night really have two different meanings each of them have two meanings and that's why we can say at night at night is talking about the dark part of the day and when we talk about days we say on like i have to go to work on monday or we're leaving on the 3rd of august or i saw him on the first day of the week when we talk about weeks we say in for example in the first week of september i'm flying to paris and when we talk about time or when we talk about specific hours and minutes we say at for example the party starts at 10 pm or at 9 00 am i'm going to the doctor's office it's important to use the right prepositions when we're talking about different time periods because it can be confusing when a person listens to you and you use the wrong preposition it might mean something completely different and you want them to understand you correctly so use the right preposition many different cultures around the world think of days times months years weeks and calendars in general in different ways the majority of the world today uses something called the gregorian calendar but some countries also use another calendar and in the world that we live in today it's really important for us to communicate with people around the world in different places and this means that we need to understand time zones there are a lot of time zones around the world and some time zones actually change throughout the year in the united states we have something called daylight savings time and this means in the spring we move forward an hour we move our clocks forward one hour and we skip one hour of the day we just lose it it just disappears can you believe that and then in autumn we add one more hour we move the clocks back one hour and magically this hour comes into our lives and we have an extra hour in the day and we get to live one hour longer so it can be really confusing to understand time zones when the time zones are changing and that's why it's really important for you to include a time zone anytime that you write a date and a time of a meeting today because you don't know where the other person might be when it's time to have the meeting and one last question before we finish this video where you live does the calendar week start on monday or on sunday does the week start on monday or sunday in your country so leave a comment down below and let me know tell me if it's monday or sunday tell me what country you're in and tell me what time zone you're in too thanks a lot for watching make sure you press like press subscribe hit that bell button so you get notified when there's a new video and i will see you next time bye bye

Channel: English With Kris Amerikos

Views: 2,348

Keywords: prepositions of time, prepositions of time in on at, speaking about time in english, days in english, english prepositions, english grammar, in on at, at on in, on in at, at in on, at on in time, at on in preposition of time, at on in english grammar, at on in use in english, time prepositions in english, when does the week start, what day is the first day of the week, english prepositions of time, prepositions of time at on in, kris amerikos, calendars in english

Id: hXI4F0uUrLc

Length: 11min 3sec (663 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021