Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcfrei | Hacker News Reader

related question to people from the US: did you actually learn the metric system in primary school? did you learn it besides the imperial units? I believe as Tloewald pointed out that the adoption really depends on whether people are learning it and not what politicians declare to be the standard.

View on HN

You learn it, but academically. Growing up with everything in feet, miles, pounds, etc... you get a feel for whether to put on a sweater if it's supposed to be 60 degrees out or not, or how long it might take to drive 10 miles on the freeway, or about how far 20 feet is. So even for someone like myself who has lived in Europe for a long time, metric units don't feel quite as 'native' or ingrained, except for temperatures, because you deal with those every day.

You learn it, but you don't use it practically outside the classroom. So the units don't get ingrained in your thinking. You really need to use the units for cooking, for personal measurements like height and weight, for driving, for weather, to really get used to them.

I can't remember if it was primary school or high school, but I learned it. It was not beside the imperial units. Those were learned first (and very early) while metric was taught as a part of science classes.

Yep, learned metric as well as imperial, and how to convert between the two. Primary school was ~20 years ago for me.

High school science was all in SI, of course.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com