4 ms·

Traditional unit in metric crafts is cm and the smallest traditional distance is 0.5 cm (pronounced "half" not "O point 5"). Notebook grid is 0.5 cm for example

by ajuc 6y ago

Traditional unit in metric crafts is cm and the smallest traditional distance is 0.5 cm (pronounced "half" not "O point 5"). Notebook grid is 0.5 cm for example and you write and draw everything at shool on that grid so you get used to it (and get intuitive feel for how long a cm (2 grids) is in the process). The dimensions you're mostly using are 0.5 cm, 1 cm, 1.5 cm, 2 cm, 2.5 cm, 5 cm, 10 cm. > A quarter inch generally seems right for a small spacing. A quarter inch is 6.35 mm compared to 5 mm (0.5 cm) which is basically the same for estetic purposes, any preference will be caused by familiarity more than any objective criteria. > 1 inch and 1 half inch feels easier to keep in mind than 1 centimeter and 5 millimeters Nobody says or thinks "1 centimeter and 5 millimeters" just like nobody says "I'm 1 meter and 80 centimeters tall". You're "180 centimeters tall" or (less often) "1.8 m tall". There's even a word in my language "półtora" which means "one and a half", so 1.5 cm is just "półtora centymetra". But even with languages without this word people think "one and a half cm" not "one cm and five mm". You almost never mix units in metric in the same expression, it just makes everything difficult for no reason. I think Americans don't understand that decimals are second nature to people using metric. When you write 1/2 we write 0.5 but we think the same - "half".

xxs 6y ago
>Nobody says or thinks "1 centimeter and 5 millimeters" just like nobody says "I'm 1 meter and 80 centimeters tall". You're "180 centimeters tall" or (less often) "1.8 m tall". one-eighty is quite common. That might depend on the country and language.
- ajuc 6y ago
  I guess. "One" is shorter than "hundred" in English while it's the other way in Polish (jeden vs sto). I was very surprised that English people say "fifteen hundred" for 1500, I never thought about that number this way before, it was always "tysiąc pięćset" (one thousand five hundred).
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    Most English speakers say the year is "fifteen hundred", but it's mostly American people who say "fifteen hundred" in other cases. en-GB: Today is the thirty-first of August, twenty twenty. The USA has reported an additional one thousand, seven hundred and seventy one Covid-nineteen cases. I would normally leave work around five-thirty, since I can catch the seventeen forty-five train home and watch the end of the six o'clock news. If I miss the train, I might take the two thirty bus instead [i.e. bus 230], or else the one three five.
- OJFord 6y ago
  But that's just a way of pronouncing large numbers; that's still saying '180 centimetres', not '1 [metre and] 80 centimetres'.
  - bhaak 6y ago
    Are you sure? Intuitively I would have said, that "I'm one eighty tall" is an abbreviation for "I'm one [meter] [and] 80 [centimeter] tall". Thinking about it, if I measure something with a folding ruler, I would more naturally say "it's one meter eighty long" (German native speaker here, as already said elsewhere, with other languages YMMV). But the point still stands. In metric, you can slap the numbers together or separate them, convert them to different units or sprinkle easily units in between or not. It all works. At worst it is just moving the decimal point around or adding/removing zeros. Very easily done in your head.
    - ajuc 6y ago
      In German would you say "I'm one four and 80" for 184cm? Cause that's confusing :)
      - bhaak 6y ago
        Not confusing to a native speaker :-) But yes, that's exactly how you would say it in German. There might be some part of the brain reserved to parse that sentence as "I'm (one) (four and 80)" but this doesn't feel weird or confusing at all. Telephone numbers on the other hand are more confusing. Luckily you don't need to say them out loud anymore these days.
        lsinger 6y ago
        I’d say “one eighty-four” but of course the problem is that in german we mix up the order of the tens and ones. And in fact so does English — it’s twenty-four but fif-teen (five ten, not ten five). In german we do that until 99 (nine and ninety).
      - qayxc 6y ago
- lucideer 6y ago
  If we're talking about what's common in English, I think it's a little odd to discuss European metric habits in the context of the English language. While English is a "lingua franca" in Western countries, the two main native-English-speaking countries in Europe are very recent metric adoptees. Ireland didn't finish adopting the metric system until 2005, so still use imperial units for many colloquial uses; e.g. human height & weight. The U.K. is further behind, and if you couple that with the nationalistic associations the imperial system will have there, colloquial uses are even more widespread. I think metric use in English is only going to become more natural and fluent with generational use.
  - xxs 6y ago
    Malta should be included too; They used to be part of the UK till 1964, they still drive on the left side, so no idea how they feel/speak about metric.
    - lucideer 6y ago
      Yeah. I prefixed my country listing with "the two main" as I know Malta is also another but I know much much less about habits & metrication there. It looks to be quite complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_units_of_measurement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_units_of_measurement Also, I think English, while an official language of Malta, is much less dominant than it would be in Ireland (or the UK).
      - xxs 6y ago
        It's been 2 decades since my visit there (totally loved it). English was spoken everywhere, even though Maltese was common as well.
squiggleblaz 6y ago
I find the European 0.5 mm block is very small and cramped - I'm pretty in sure in Australia it's 0.8 mm by standard. Probably my small letters are almost 0.5 mm tall so I don't really know how to fit into 0.5 mm. Whether this destroys your argument or not, I don't know. I don't think preferred measures really depend on this sort of thing.
- ajuc 6y ago
  Are you using cursive? Cause I've seen some English people use capitalics in handwriting and then it would be hard for sure. I find 0.5cm grid perfectly fine for writing, prefer it to the 0.9cm line notebooks (we have them too - for "soft" subjects like language learning where you don't need to graph anything). https://kamionkawielka.szkola.pl/files/zadanie%202%2024.03.jpg https://kamionkawielka.szkola.pl/files/zadanie%202%2024.03.j...
- roelschroeven 6y ago
  (The size of the block is 5 mm or 0.5 cm, not 0.5 mm; I'm sure you know that and it was just a typing error) You're not supposed to cram your letters into that 5 mm space: you generally use two lines, which gives you a 1 cm lineheight. That being said, I don't like that raster size for writing. They're nice for drawing schematics and stuff, but for writing I very much prefer a grid of 4mm × 8mm (like this: https://www.dbs.be/images/vergroot/2518_2.jpg https://www.dbs.be/images/vergroot/2518_2.jpg).
scambier 6y ago
In French, you'd say "je fais 1 mètre 80" (literally "I'm 1 meter 80") and write it 1m80. Saying "180 centimètres" would be weird in a casual conversation, but fine in a professionnal setting. For a weight of 1500g, you'd usually say "1 kilo 5", maybe "1 kilo 500", but rarely "1 kilo 500 grammes". So yeah, decimals are so used that you don't even need to tell the unit, it's implicit. I once had an american argue with me about Fahrenheit vs Celsius, because "Fahrenheit is more precise". I guess he was either a superhuman who can feel the difference between 20°C and 21°C, or someone who never heard about decimals.
- 8draco8 6y ago
  In Polish it's common to use "deko" (ang. deca) especially for weight of groceries. So it's perfectly normal to buy "20 deko sera" instead of "200 gram sera" (both means 200g of cheese)
bromuro 6y ago
Wait i do say “one meter and eighty centimeters”!

by ajuc 6y ago

xxs 6y ago

>Nobody says or thinks "1 centimeter and 5 millimeters" just like nobody says "I'm 1 meter and 80 centimeters tall". You're "180 centimeters tall" or (less often) "1.8 m tall". one-eighty is quite common. That might depend on the country and language.

ajuc 6y ago
I guess. "One" is shorter than "hundred" in English while it's the other way in Polish (jeden vs sto). I was very surprised that English people say "fifteen hundred" for 1500, I never thought about that number this way before, it was always "tysiąc pięćset" (one thousand five hundred).
- Symbiote 6y ago
  Most English speakers say the year is "fifteen hundred", but it's mostly American people who say "fifteen hundred" in other cases. en-GB: Today is the thirty-first of August, twenty twenty. The USA has reported an additional one thousand, seven hundred and seventy one Covid-nineteen cases. I would normally leave work around five-thirty, since I can catch the seventeen forty-five train home and watch the end of the six o'clock news. If I miss the train, I might take the two thirty bus instead [i.e. bus 230], or else the one three five.
OJFord 6y ago
But that's just a way of pronouncing large numbers; that's still saying '180 centimetres', not '1 [metre and] 80 centimetres'.
- bhaak 6y ago
  Are you sure? Intuitively I would have said, that "I'm one eighty tall" is an abbreviation for "I'm one [meter] [and] 80 [centimeter] tall". Thinking about it, if I measure something with a folding ruler, I would more naturally say "it's one meter eighty long" (German native speaker here, as already said elsewhere, with other languages YMMV). But the point still stands. In metric, you can slap the numbers together or separate them, convert them to different units or sprinkle easily units in between or not. It all works. At worst it is just moving the decimal point around or adding/removing zeros. Very easily done in your head.
  - ajuc 6y ago
    In German would you say "I'm one four and 80" for 184cm? Cause that's confusing :)
    - bhaak 6y ago
      Not confusing to a native speaker :-) But yes, that's exactly how you would say it in German. There might be some part of the brain reserved to parse that sentence as "I'm (one) (four and 80)" but this doesn't feel weird or confusing at all. Telephone numbers on the other hand are more confusing. Luckily you don't need to say them out loud anymore these days.
      - lsinger 6y ago
        I’d say “one eighty-four” but of course the problem is that in german we mix up the order of the tens and ones. And in fact so does English — it’s twenty-four but fif-teen (five ten, not ten five). In german we do that until 99 (nine and ninety).
    - qayxc 6y ago
lucideer 6y ago
If we're talking about what's common in English, I think it's a little odd to discuss European metric habits in the context of the English language. While English is a "lingua franca" in Western countries, the two main native-English-speaking countries in Europe are very recent metric adoptees. Ireland didn't finish adopting the metric system until 2005, so still use imperial units for many colloquial uses; e.g. human height & weight. The U.K. is further behind, and if you couple that with the nationalistic associations the imperial system will have there, colloquial uses are even more widespread. I think metric use in English is only going to become more natural and fluent with generational use.
- xxs 6y ago
  Malta should be included too; They used to be part of the UK till 1964, they still drive on the left side, so no idea how they feel/speak about metric.
  - lucideer 6y ago
    Yeah. I prefixed my country listing with "the two main" as I know Malta is also another but I know much much less about habits & metrication there. It looks to be quite complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_units_of_measurement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_units_of_measurement Also, I think English, while an official language of Malta, is much less dominant than it would be in Ireland (or the UK).
    - xxs 6y ago
      It's been 2 decades since my visit there (totally loved it). English was spoken everywhere, even though Maltese was common as well.

squiggleblaz 6y ago

I find the European 0.5 mm block is very small and cramped - I'm pretty in sure in Australia it's 0.8 mm by standard. Probably my small letters are almost 0.5 mm tall so I don't really know how to fit into 0.5 mm. Whether this destroys your argument or not, I don't know. I don't think preferred measures really depend on this sort of thing.

ajuc 6y ago
Are you using cursive? Cause I've seen some English people use capitalics in handwriting and then it would be hard for sure. I find 0.5cm grid perfectly fine for writing, prefer it to the 0.9cm line notebooks (we have them too - for "soft" subjects like language learning where you don't need to graph anything). https://kamionkawielka.szkola.pl/files/zadanie%202%2024.03.jpg https://kamionkawielka.szkola.pl/files/zadanie%202%2024.03.j...
roelschroeven 6y ago
(The size of the block is 5 mm or 0.5 cm, not 0.5 mm; I'm sure you know that and it was just a typing error) You're not supposed to cram your letters into that 5 mm space: you generally use two lines, which gives you a 1 cm lineheight. That being said, I don't like that raster size for writing. They're nice for drawing schematics and stuff, but for writing I very much prefer a grid of 4mm × 8mm (like this: https://www.dbs.be/images/vergroot/2518_2.jpg https://www.dbs.be/images/vergroot/2518_2.jpg).

scambier 6y ago

In French, you'd say "je fais 1 mètre 80" (literally "I'm 1 meter 80") and write it 1m80. Saying "180 centimètres" would be weird in a casual conversation, but fine in a professionnal setting. For a weight of 1500g, you'd usually say "1 kilo 5", maybe "1 kilo 500", but rarely "1 kilo 500 grammes". So yeah, decimals are so used that you don't even need to tell the unit, it's implicit. I once had an american argue with me about Fahrenheit vs Celsius, because "Fahrenheit is more precise". I guess he was either a superhuman who can feel the difference between 20°C and 21°C, or someone who never heard about decimals.

8draco8 6y ago
In Polish it's common to use "deko" (ang. deca) especially for weight of groceries. So it's perfectly normal to buy "20 deko sera" instead of "200 gram sera" (both means 200g of cheese)

bromuro 6y ago

Wait i do say “one meter and eighty centimeters”!