Pinyin,the phonetic spelling system of Chinese This article is partly adopted from a book named THUS SPOKE LAOZI(DAO DE JING),and I think this part about the phonetics of Chinese language system, especially the Mandarin, is quite professional and of great use to those holding confusion or misunderstanding thoughts. What matters most is that the writer Charles Q. Wu(吴千之) is a famous translator who enjoys praises and admiration for his accurate transformation of not only English and Chinese, but also ancient Chinese and contemporary Mandarin. Thus, I share it with people who need it with my sincerely minds, Though it’s quite professional. What’s more, I kept holding my confusion of where should I put the punctuation like “,” or “.”,if there are “” exist. In the book, all the punctuations are well arranged before ”,which is quite different from what I was taught about Chinese punctuations’ rules. So if you have a clear mind of what it should be, please contact me or just leave your messages, thank you so much! Pinyin——“拼音” All the characters that appear in the commentaries as well as in this introduction are accompanied with their phonetic spelling known as Pinyin. A Romanization system for Chinese characters known as the Wade-Giles system has been in service for over a century. It’s a phonetically based system with its own rationale and has served the English publishing world well. It was under this system that the word “Tao” came into the English language, following the rule that the letter t before a vowel letter stands for the unaspirated “t” as the t in “style”, as opposed to the t followed by an apostrophe(t’ao),which should be pronounced like the English consonant “t” as in “tower”. Likewise, the apostrophe is used to distinguished aspirants like p’ and k’ from their unaspirated counterparts as in “spell” and “skill”. By this rule, the character 德 should be spelled as te in Wade-Giles because the “t” is unaspirated. In 1958, the People’ Republic of China published a new Romanization system known as Pinyin, literally “phonetic spelling”. Actually the new system is structured quite closely according to the old Wade-Giles, but with at least two major differences.