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.
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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.
Get ruler. Hold your arm out 90degrees, Measure from the tip of your finger 1 metreacross your body, and rember where that Metre ends on your body. Then you always have a reference for 1metre
I was taught this to measure electrical cable. For me it's from my left shoulder bone to my right finger tips (or the right shoulder to left finger tips)
My 2 cents to some of the really good comments already mentioned. 1kg is 2 US lbs +10%. Learn what 10cm is, use that as base for small stuff Learn a stride that's 1m. 1m is approx 3ft Get a good scale in grams Celcius is linear, Fahrenheit is not. Hence 0 freezing, 100 boiling, 50 is exactly half that amount of energy.
Now if you're into engineering I'd recommend you grab yourself a caliper and measure some of the common products you can buy. You'll notice that anything in 16th, 32th or even 64th is a most likely an approximation to a perfect size in mm.
It's important to realize that the US is the only real producing country in the world using US customary. Relatively speaking there's very little actual manufacturing being done in true US customary.
For length, for an average male one meter is about one large step with extended legs (useful for distances), or the distance between e.g. the left side of your torso to the end of the extended right hand (useful for estimating the length of rope or smth).
For weight, it might be useful that 1 liter (that's 1 dm3 but noone uses that except sometimes in scientific literature) is almost exactly 1 kg, and a typical cup fits 0.25 liter. A shot of alcohol is either 20 or 40 milliliters (0.02 or 0.04 liter) depending on where you are and what you order.
For conversions you just need to remember the base unit (e.g. meter and grams/kilograms) and the decimal prefixes. But you really only need milli (1/1000), centi (1/100) and kilo (1000) in day to day life. Then you simply shift the decimal.
I'm in Canada, and learning French in school actually helped me with fractional measurements since French is based on Latin.
Cent is 100 in French, so 1/100 meters is a centimeter
Mille is 1000 in French, so 1/1000 meters is a millimeter
Dix is 10 in French, so 1/10 meters is a decimeter (this is last because it's not super helpful since you never see deci- units in the wild outside of niche applications)
And for the powers of 10, we only really talked about kilo (1000) in school, but I was interested in computers since I was a child so I figured out mega, giga, terra, etc fairly early on.
A person who buys some material, Thinks to themselves managerial, I could use grams or litres, Maybe even amps or square meters, At least it isn't Imperial.
Man you got some giant feet and sausage fingers lol