The third installment in my ‘Eating Chinese’ series is the idiom 生米煮成熟饭. Pinyin: shēngmǐ zhǔchéng shúfàn.

Literally meaning ‘the raw rice is now cooked’, the figurative meaning of this phrase is ‘what's done is done’, or the English idiom ‘it's no good crying over spilt milk’. Here is the example sentence:

她怀孕了，那个男的说他一定要跟她结婚，因为生米已经煮成熟饭. Pinyin: tā huáiyùn le, nà ge nán de shuō tā yí dìng yào gēn tā jiéhūn, yīnwéi shēngmǐ zhǔchéng shúfàn. English: ‘She’s pregnant, and the man whose baby it is says he will definitely marry her – after all, what’s done is done.’

In the recording (at the top of this post), first you will hear 生米煮成熟饭on its own, and then the example sentence. If you have problems playing the recording, you can also hear it here.