i need help! re: Confucian saying

[Gotti]

Hi everybody! i'm new on this forum^^,i'm studying mandarin chinese at university in venice(first year) and i'm attending lessons of chinese philosophy as well. We spoke about kongfuzi the last time with our teacher and he told us a few quotations,writing on the blackboard in toneless pin yin.

One of these quotations was the following: Zhi Yu Xue . It should mean "Drive your will towards learning" . I gather that the first word should be 志 , meaning will, while the last one is 學 meaning learning of course. But i'm not sure about the yu,he said it meant something like "Towards" but he didn't write tones nor characters . Can you help me telling me a few informations about the word?So that i can look for it in my dictionary .

Thanks

[JasonTsia]

I guess "Zhi Yu Xue" is "志於學"( 志于学 in Simplified Chinese).

[rootfool]

it's "志于学"，即“立志于做学问”.

the whole sentence is "十五而志于学，三十而立，四十而不惑，五十而知天命，六十而耳顺，七十而随心所欲不逾矩。"

Hmm, I'm afraid I can't translate this sentence because maybe my translation will mislead you.

[Etwood]

Hi there,

my guess is that the saying you want is 志于学 (志於學). I did a Google search for this term and it got 6,360,000 hits, and on the first page of results, they were all related to Confucius.

[Gotti]

thank you guys you helped me a lot,i can't really enjoy confucius if do not know the charachters perfectly!

[skylee]

i can't really enjoy confucius if do not know the charachters perfectly!

For your enjoyment, you may wish to read this through (in both English and Chinese) -> http://www.confucius.org/lunyu/lange.htm