关于and对于

[Andy-Ru]

Hi everyone!! I was just studying some grammar for class and realised that 关于 and 对于 have similar meanings. What's the difference between them?

Thanks

Andy

[muyongshi]

It's hard to explain but a quick "translation" in my mind would render 对于 as "in regards to" or "as it concerns" and 关于 as "about"

He read a book about politics

他读了一本关于政治的书

He has a lot of thoughts regarding politics

他对于政治有很看法

Best way probably to really get familiar with the difference is to read a lot of examples because it is a bit hard to explain outright but the usage is very obvious.

[gentle-fly]

关于 is "on","about","with regard to","concerning"

对于 is "for","to","toward"

[muyongshi]

关于 is "on","about","with regard to","concerning"

对于 is "for","to","toward"

This is not entirely true gentle-fly because many of those words in English are interchangeable when it comes to the Chinese usage and especially in your 对于 definitions they just don't work.

对于这次活动大家议论纷纷

Towards/To/For this activity??? No it doesn't work. We would say regarding or about this... even in my first examples technically they can be interchanged. I chose regards and about as they seem to have a little bit more of differentiate between the two despite their similarity.

[adrianlondon]

I was going to recommend http://berlin.cls.yale.edu/chineseusagedictionary/ from a recent thread here, but the page with this topic on doesn't load.

[bossidy]

The usage dictionary mentioned above can be accessed here.

[chrix]

your link isn't working for me, but this seems to be the general interface: http://comet.cls.yale.edu/chineseusagedictionary/

EDIT: and the interface frame is there, but when I try to click on the content, it doesn't load

Edited December 16, 2009 at 11:03 PM by chrix