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.

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

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)

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.

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.

realistically, nobody uses all the units.

eg, decimeters are practically unheard of.

anyway, start measuring things around you. like your fingers, your hand, your ceiling height, that sort of thing. and then remember what those measurements feel/look like. that'll give you something to compare other things to. you can do the same thing with volume measurements and so on.

for example, i found that one of the knuckles on one of my fingers is exactly 4cm long, so i always have that with me.

You don't really need to remember conversions within units, because it's all in base 10. Apart from that, 1 millilitre is 1cm³ of water, which weighs 1 gram, and requires 1 calorie of heat to increase its temperature by 1°C.

1 km is about 15 minutes walk.

1 meter is about a step.

1 cm is about the thickness of a gusset on medium sized industrial machinery

1 kg is about 2 pints (or a little more than a quart)

20°C is comfortable for most people, 35+ is uncomfortably warm

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.

If it's 0 degrees outside you're cold, if it's 100 degrees outside you're dead.

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:

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"

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.

For Celsius:

30 is warm

20 is nice

10 is chilly

0 is ice

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.

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?

1L of water is 1kg