Asklemmy

10cm is long. don't let anybody tell you otherwise

30 is hot, 20 is nice, 10 is cool, 0 is ice.

Honestly, with metric, 24 hour time and celcius, the easiest way to learn is just to switch to it completely.

I'm in an imperial country and still switched over to metric/24h/c just because it makes a lot more sense for most personal stuff. It's been enough years that I know much of it just ambiently. I prefer it, tbh.

For distance:

• learn to do a 1m pace
• measure your height to compare against other things
• measure the length of your finger gun (mines basically 150mm)

For temperature (for me):

• below 6 think about wind chill and keep warm
• 6-10 = warm jacket weather
• 10-14 = pants and sweatshirts
• 14-18 = great exercising weather
• 18-22 = shorts and t-shirts or light sweatshirt.
• 22-26 = very warm
• 26-30 = uncomfortable
• 30+ = sweating just walking around

For weight, it is too dependent on your strength. For some, lifting a 20kg sack of flour would be to much, for others grabbing two 40kg sacks of cement per trip to the palet is normal.

The military and doctors in the United States officially use the 24 time format, there is something to think about (when we talk about accuracy and adequacy)

A good base is knowing milli is a thousandth and kilo is a 1000 1000 milligram = a gram, 1000 grams = a kilogram 1000 millililters = a liter, 1000 liters = a kiloliter 1000 millimeters = a meter, 1000 meters = a kilometer

Plus, they're all connected. 1 gram of water is 1 milliliter and takes up 1 cubic centimeter.

You can walk a klick in 10 mins

A ruler is 30cm. Roughly a third of a meter.

Four cups to a litre.

Spreading my hand out, the distance between the tip of my thumb and the tip of my pinky is almost exactly 20 cm.

When I need to measure something like a piece of furniture, I "crab walk" my hand along its side, counting 20 cm for every step.

Uhm, it might sound arrogant but in metric you don't need that sort of thing? The next order of measurment is just ±10^x where X is the number of dimensions you want to look at: 10 for i.e. length, 100 for area and 1000 for volume.

Lets look at length: Most commonly used are Millimeter, Centimeter, Meter and Kilometer.

Meter is the base. The name centimeter derives from meter and the Latin word centum meaning 100.So a centimeter is hundredth of a meter (decemeter, 10th, ist not really used much in everyday life). One step further down is millimeter: mille is Latin for thousand, therefore a millimeter is a thousandth of a meter.

Going up Greek prefixes are used: Deka-(10) and hektometer (100) are rarely used and Greek chilloi means thousand and therefore a kilometer is 1000 meters.

Staying in one dimension the same applies to gramme for weight: Milligrams, Gram and Kilograms are the moat common.

Going up in dimensions we use the same prefixes but the multiplyer changes because 10^2 is 100. So to go from 1 m² (one meter to the width times one meter depth) to 1 km² (thousand meters wide times thousand meeter deep)) the multiplier is not 10³ (1000) but 100³.

The whole prefixes are effectively optional and just for better readability.

1 cm is about the width of the tip of your pinky finger.

1 m is about the distance from your nose to your fingertips if you hold your arm out, and extend your fingers.

100 m is the length of the straight section of an athletic track, which is about the same length as a football field.

1 mL is about the volume of the tip of your pinky finger.

1 L is about 1 quart, which is half a carton of milk (unless you get milk in the smaller 1 quart size).

The mile-to-km conversion is pretty close to 1½.

The kg-to-pound conversion is two-and-a-bit.

A difference of 1°C is close to a difference of 2°F.

Edit: My milk comparison was wrong - I've corrected it.

Edit: Of course by "m" I meant "mile"

looking for anything to remember the hierarchy and memorizing the metric and Celsius measurement system, sometimes explained in schooling or local sayings. (if I had an example for those systems I would give one lol).

This is how I was taught it in school:

I just learned some basic things and go from there.

A Ruler is Ruler 12 inches or 30 cm

A meter is roughly equivalent to a yard slightly more and both are like 1 big step

And then i just remember that theres 2.2 lbs per kg

1.6 kms per mile

YES! Do it brother! 👏 I'm US born and raised and I've voluntarily switched to metric a while ago. Metric is actually more intuitive to me now.

I started with just memorizing all the conversions but that’s literally just adding another step.

Personally, I think this is a mistake. What worked for me was to start building reference points in metric directly. No conversions.

• yes: "Oh, it's nice outside. What temperature is it? 20C, great. I'll remember I like 20C."
• no: "I like 70F, what's that in Celsius?"
• yes: "Wow. That's long board. How long is it? 2m, great. I'll remember 2m is long."
• no: "What's 6ft to meters?"

Don't ask, "What's this in metric?" just ask directly "How long/fast/heavy/hot is this thing?"

You need to get out there and start measuring and experiencing stuff. Measure parts of your body to build more reference points. For example, I know from the floor to my waist is about 1m, from the tip of my index finger to the first bend line is about 2.5cm. My weight is about 65kg. Normal body temperature is about 37C, but 38C and above is a fever. My mom's house is about 30km away.

Switching temperature to C is pretty easy, that's a good start. Here are some other tools that may help.

• meter only tape measure (I love this tape measure) measure the length of everything
• gram only kitchen scale measure the weight of all your food
• newton-meter only torque wrench tighten all the bolts

Also, did you know Amazon US limits the products available to us? But you can break out and shop from Amazon Japan, for example, and get products that aren't available from Amazon US. I've found that Amazon Japan has way more metric-only options than other places.

I really like buying metric only tools because:

• it removes the possibility of relapse, forcing you to build new reference points
• it removes the possibility of other people messing with the units
• it removes clutter from the UI, making it easier to use

Eventually, you could switch your car too, but I wouldn't recommend you do that right now. After a few months, you'll start getting the hang of metric more. It really doesn't take that long to adjust.

P.S. Does anyone know where I could get some metric-only measuring ~~cups~~ cans, containers, vessels?

For daily use of temps, I found it best to just switch my apps and stuff to use Celsius. Then just made a point to take mental notes as to see what the current temps were on my devices. Especially when it was feeling too hot or cold. On days that felt nice, would see what temps they were and just kind of learned what ranges were between them (I tend to find 16-23C to be fine warm temps).

I can't say exactly what the temps in Fahrenheit directly. But can give a range for friends and co-workers if they happen to ask me what the temps are outside (they obviously take the Celsius value as not helpful but they know I am going to give them). I can say that for me the "exposure therapy" of just using Celsius has been much easier than things like distance. I can kind of handle thinking of static distances, but I am not able to translate active things like speed.

For temperature:

Water freezes at 0, boils at 100. Room temperature 20 degrees Celsius. Normal body temp 37 degrees.

Trivia of minus 40 Fahrenheit being the same as minus 40 Celsius.

Height and weight are usually still thought of in imperial (canadian here), so I think of myself as 6'2", instead of 188 cm.

Volumes and lengths and weights are related. One cubic cm is one mL of liquid. One cubic centimeter of water weighs one gram. One thousand mL of water makes one Liter, which weighs one kilogram.

2.205 ponds makes one kilogram.

Shifting between miles and km is a pain in the ass, given the 1.6 km per mile.

Fellow American convert to the metric system. Converting, in my opinion, won't get you very far in actually understanding the measurements. To this day, the conversion rate is something I have to dig through my memory for.

For me what helped with the temperature scale was breaking it into chunks based on what I would wear, 10°-15° would be a pullover sweatshirt, 15°-20° a track jacket, etc, which got me to stop focusing so much on the conversion. Eventually you just get a sense of these things, I think that most people can only really feel a difference in air temperature of about 1°C. 0° being the freezing point cutoff is super helpful for judging things like potential road conditions if it's wet.

For distances I first got the sense of how far things were in kilometers by being a runner and knowing distances around my neighborhood as to how they lined up with running a 5k, 10k, etc. For meters, at my height and gait, my stride length is about a meter long. A little bit on the shorter side of things, but it still helped me get an idea as to what a meter looked like in physical space, even if it's off a bit. Centimeters and millimeters are a different story. Hard to find perfect analogs in the world, but you'll find something eventually. I think for example long grain rice can be ~1 cm in length for example.

The biggest lesson in my own journey and seeing a lot of people online talk about trying to do the conversion is that people get overly concerned with precision when first making the switch. If you actually think about most of our daily interactions with measurements, they're much more approximate. For example, the difference between whether it's 71°F or 73°F is rarely pointed out. The temperature is just "in the low 70s". We say that something is "about 20 miles away" which is almost an implicit 7-8 mile range. I would guess 80% of the time, this is how we interact with the units we use, so focus on that. No one is going to get upset if they ask the temperature and you're off by a few degrees C.

In terms of mnemonics like US kids get in school for some of these things, everything in the metric system is a multiple of 10 from everything else, which is what makes it great. Also remember that at room temperature, water's density is 1 g/mL, so if one of capacity or weight is easier to visualize for you, it's a shortcut to the other. Standard disposable water bottle in the US is 500 mL or half a kilogram of water.

If only metric time had caught on too....

~~We don't really need any of those mnemonics because it's a perfect system~~

More seriously there is the "King Henry Died, Drinking Chocolate Milk" for the Kilo (1000) Hecto (100) Deca (10), Deci (0.1) Centi (0.01) Milli (0.001), but that doesn't really help with measuring on the spot, aside from being able to get the prefix right.

There's an average step being 1 meter, but thats less useful for people with shorter legs unless they want to join the ministry of silly walks.

One that I use often is converting meters per second to kilometers per hour. Because 1 meter per second is 3600 meters per hour or 3.6 kilometers per hour, you can actually skip the multiply by 3600 and then divide by 1000 and just multiply by 3.6.

But aside from time conversions, there isn't really anything else that can help because it's just moving the decimal.

Slightly related, you can tell how far away lightning is by listening for the thunder and counting the seconds. Sound travels at 346 m/s so every 3 seconds is roughly 1 kilometer away. But I suppose you can do the same for miles and count to 5.

A small trick is to measure your own hand. How big is your fingers spread all the way? That will always be a good quick measure. Like this: 🤙and 🤘.

And for the hierarchy:
Kilo means 1000 of something
Centi means 1/100.
Mili means 1/1000.

kilo + meter = 1000 meter. centi + liter = is a cube of water that measures ~~1 cm all around, that actually 1/100 of a liter. And 1/100 of a kilograms if it is water.~~
Edit: 1cm cube is a mililiter, because 10x10x10 its 3dimensional as Moody pointed out.