Telling time with "hace" and "era/eran"
¡Hola!
I am completing a spanish lesson on another site and they teach you to to tell the time like this:
Hace treinta minutos eran las 7:00. or Hace quince minutos eran las 3:30.
I have always learned to say it as "son las siete y media" or "son las cuatro menos cuarto" and have never heard it stated in that manner before. Is this a common way to tell the time? It is difficult for me to think this way in my head.
2 Answers
Strange that they don't have the relative pronoun que in it, I would have expected it to be there. But this isn't a construction limited to just telling the time, it deals with elapsed time in general.
Hace + time + que = It has been + time + long since
So they're saying it has been thirty minutes since it was 7:00
There is another description, for saying how long something went on (how long were they fighting? They were fighting for this long) that follows the same rules but uses hacia instead of hace.
Check the spanishdict vid here: lesson 3.4
And this article here: Hacia/hace + time + que
It's not something you would normally say if someone ask you the time but imagine this dialogue:
A: ¡Llegas tarde!
B: Pero si son las 7:00
A: No, hace 15 minutos eran las 7:00.
