熟能生巧
- Literal
- familiarity can give rise to skill
- Figurative
- Practice brings skill: what feels clumsy at first ends up coming easily once you have done it enough times.
Where does 熟能生巧 come from?
No anecdote is known to lie behind it: it works like a proverb fixed by use, with the ordinary cause-and-effect shape — 熟 ("knowing something from doing it over and over") leads to 巧 ("knack, skill"), and 能生 ("can give rise to") is the bridge between them. You hear it mostly as advice or as reassurance, when someone is learning something with their hands or drilling an exercise and still doing it clumsily.
How is 熟能生巧 used? Two examples
- 别急，多练几次就好了，熟能生巧。
Don't stress — run through it a few more times and you'll have it. Practice makes perfect.
- 他包饺子越来越快，真是熟能生巧。
He wraps dumplings faster and faster — practice really does make perfect.
In Wanyu, all 400 chengyu have audio on every sentence, and you can save them to your decks and review them with spaced repetition. Free.
