Cool! Thanks for sharing!
Now that I think about it, I think I own a carpenter’s measuring tape. Maybe that’s why they don’t call out cm.
Also just to be clear, my measuring tape is definitely not a standard tape you can buy at a local hardware store. It took some effort for me to find a metric-only measuring tape.
centimeters is probably the most common in households
I’m curious, where are you from? In the US, I’d say we think of centimeters as a pseudo-inch, so I think I understand why people would gravitate to centimeters here.
But do other countries use centimeters as much? I’m especially curious about really metric countries like Japan or (who else?) France? Germany? I wouldn’t be surprised if Canada or UK use centimeters.
Related: centimetres or millimetres
It’s great that the units are linked like this. I actually had to use this once. I didn’t have a container to measure out 1liter of water, but I did have a kitchen scale that could measure 1,000 grams! 🙌🏽
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.
YES! I think this is because they’re converting back to imperial units. You can always tell when someone was thinking in imperial because the metric units are like 17.4C or 8.12mm or 98.7km/h. For sure, things don’t need to be that precise. When I convert either way I always convert to a nice number. 100 km/h -> 60mi/h
It’s just like translating language, you don’t translate the literal words of a sentence, you translate the overall idea.
never used measuring cups … We use cans
Sure, yeah, that’s what I meant. Some physical artifact I can use to measure liquid in ml.
These look perfect! Thanks!
A good base is knowing milli is a thousandth and kilo is a 1000
YES! I feel like a common pitfall people run into is trying to bust out all sorts of fancy prefixes, deka, hecto, centi, deci, etc and then people get overwhelmed by all of that.
The most common prefixes are kilo 1000x or milli 1/1000. That’s all you should focus on.
The next order of measurment is just ±10^x
There’s a strong possibility that I’m just dumb, but this used to trip me up at first. Especially if I was on the spot: 1250mm to m, go! Uh, 125.0? Uh, 12.50?! Uh, 1.250! Yeah!
Or 1.5L to mL, go! Uh, 150mL? Uh, 1500mL! Yeah!
Also, realizing that the most popular prefixes are either kilo 1000x or milli 1/1000 helped. For example, cm don’t seem very common, like dimensions are almost always in mm.
I heard someone say once, the metric system is better by a thousand.
yard
Except in US handegg, do people still use yards? It sounds old-timey to me now. Normally, I either hear people talk in feet or miles, but never yards. Even in school (California), I vaguely remember hearing “X yard dash” when I was a little kid, but that definitely changed to “X meter dash” as I got older.
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.
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.
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:
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?
Me too. I’m trying! 🤝