It just takes time. 10K hours or whatnot. I've been writing C++ almost every day for the last 10 years, and I'm still learning. My best advice would be to just

It just takes time. 10K hours or whatnot. I've been writing C++ almost every day for the last 10 years, and I'm still learning. My best advice would be to just do it. Don't focus on memorizing the syntax of pointer-to-member functions or the stupidly complicated overload rules. C++ is powerful but a lot of it is quite useless in practice. Instead, you should be writing DNS servers, hiding text as bit patterns in JPEGs, or whatever other thing you find intellectually interesting. Sprinkle in some Google and bake for a few years. I'm sorry to say that like with most things in life, there aren't any shortcuts here.