A little over a decade ago, I moved to Montreal expecting, perhaps foolishly, that I would become fluent in French. It was a goal that proved elusive — I just couldn’t master the Quebecois accent, which was almost inscrutably nasal compared with the Parisian French I learned in high school. I stuttered through one quotidian exchange after another, painfully aware I was marking myself as a clumsy outsider. It was exhausting. Somewhat chastened, I gave up on French and turned my attention to a new language: Celsius.

I gravitated toward Celsius for the same reason I had wanted to learn French: to experience the world through a foreign filter. Besides, I didn’t really have a choice. Montreal is a bilingual city, but it uses just one temperature scale: Celsius. Of course, the same is true in every country aside from the United States and a few other global superpowers like the Cayman Islands and Belize. Using Fahrenheit in Canada was a sure way to brand myself not only as a recalcitrant American but also as a maniac. If you casually tell a friend who thinks in Celsius that it is 65 outside — nearly 150 degrees in Fahrenheit — and therefore a good day to go to the park, she will look at you as if you have misplaced your frontal lobe.

My hope was to internalize Celsius, not just to learn it but to feel it in my American flesh. The first thing I did to acquaint myself with it — forgoing that impossible conversion formula — was to memorize relative temperatures scattered throughout the scale so I could extrapolate from them. I was already aware, as most people are, that what I knew as 32 was 0, but I also came up with a few useful way stations: 10 in Celsius was 50 Fahrenheit; 21 was 70; 30 was 86. With this loose constellation of data points, I could safely guess that 15 degrees C, say, was about 60 degrees F, without constantly cross-referencing between the scales.

Scientists prefer Celsius because it integrates seamlessly with the metric system, but as a unit of measurement, it’s far less precise than Fahrenheit. This laxity has its merits. For everyday use, it’s an appealingly economical scale because it hovers mostly around 0, each unit packing a substantial punch. Still, it took me a while to regard Celsius as anything but absurd. “Seven degrees outside,” I’d think to myself as I adjusted to the forecast. “Balmy!” Ian McEwan once pointed out that British tabloids like to capitalize on this dissonance, often reporting colder temperatures in Celsius and hotter ones in Fahrenheit, which makes for more sensational headlines.