Never offer to teach fish to swim. 
Proverbs on a similar topic
- Never too late to learn.
- Practice makes perfect.
- Experience is the best teacher.
- Spare the rod and spoil the child.
- Teach your grandmother to suck eggs.
- Better to ask the way than go astray.
- Many things are lost for want of asking.
- Mistakes are often the best teachers.
- No man is born Wise or learned.
- They must hunger in frost that will not work in heat.
- What youth is used to, age remembers.
- The young pig grunts like the old sow.
- Children when they are little make parents fools, when they are great they make them mad.
- Better children weep than old men.
- One father can support ten children; ten children cannot support one father.
- The man who has not been flogged is not educated.
Related proverbs
Similar proverbs in another language
Latin
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Delphinum natare doces.
You teach a dolphin to swim.
French
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Ce n'est pas à un vieux singe qu'on apprend à faire la grimace.
You can't teach an old monkey to make a face.
-
Au poisson à nager ne montre.
To the swimming fish shows.
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Il ne faut pas enseigner aux poissons à nager.
You can't teach fish to swim.
German
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Lehre nicht die Fische schwimmen und die Tauben fliegen.
Do not teach the fish swim and the pigeons fly.
Czech
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Neuč rybu plavati a ptáka lítati.
Teach not a fish to swim, nor a bird to fly.