How to read English abbreviations in Japanese

Japanese Language Questions
1

When I’m reading something in Japanese, I want my brain to switch back to English as little as possible. When reading an article, I encountered two phrases with English abbreviations that I didn’t know how to pronounce in Japanese. I’m looking for recommended pronunciations for these two cases, as well as any suggestions for figuring this out on my own going forward (whether using jisho.org, some other resource, or whatever).

１２０ｋｍ
I read this out loud as 「ひゃく に じゅう キロ」, though I don’t know if there’s a better way to pronounce km. I suppose I could have used 「キロメートル」 instead.

－３５℃
I read this out loud as 「マイナス さん じゅう ご ＿＿＿」. I really didn’t know what to do about Celsius, though I later found 摂氏, セ氏, and セルシウス. Which of these is best? I’m also not 100% sure that using 「マイナス」 was correct, though it seems reasonable.

Any suggestions?

2

キロメートル is the technically correct one you should use for ‘km’.

マイナス is used for temperatures below 0℃, usually they’ll just say マイナスさんじゅうご度. The other terms are more technical or scientific.

You can have a listen at the NHK weather forecast here:

3

Thanks, that was very helpful!

4

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