help with 之

xiao_liang

March 24, 2010, 10:59 AM posted in General Discussion

Can anyone help me with 之 (zhī) - I'm finding the use of this character really hard to understand. I understand that it's a kind of joining character, but would appreciate some examples of its use? I have it in a list of more common chinese characters (it's in the top 100!) but can't find a reliable use?

谢谢你们！

小凉

zhenlijiang

March 24, 2010, 08:16 PM

Here are some starters:

In my limited exposure to Chinese I probably use/see it most commonly as part of ‘~之一’ (one of ~).

‘之’是100个最常用的汉字之一。
"之" is one of the 100 most commonly used hanzi.

中国菜系是世界三大菜系之一。
Chinese is one of the three great cuisines of the world.

三分之一 　　one-third

百分之三十 thirty percent

Please don't ask me to explain how exactly it's different from 的--another "of".
And I don't know if there are cases in which you may ever interchange with 的 or not.

the Silk Road is 丝绸之路.

I also see ~之间 with pretty high frequency.

夫妻之间 between husband and wife

朋友之间 among friends / between friends

I began writing this with a lot more confidence than I am ending on. So as always, I'm hoping our helpful teachers/experts will see and quickly set me right if I'm leading you astray here, and even if I'm on the right track it would be nice if they could kindly add to this and explain 之 much more completely.

xiao_liang

That's a really great start, certainly. Perhaps it's just one of those "you use it when you use it" characters that you just have to learn set pieces with.

Can you use it for every sense of between I wonder? Like:

那个两辆车之间 - Between those two cars

xiao_liang

p.s. forgot to say THANK YOU zhenlijiang!

lujiaojie

You can say:

那两辆车之间

我们之间

在那件事之后

在出国之前

xiao_liang

March 24, 2010, 08:35 PM

That's a really great start, certainly. Perhaps it's just one of those "you use it when you use it" characters that you just have to learn set pieces with.

Can you use it for every sense of between I wonder? Like:

那个两辆车之间 - Between those two cars