 There are two issues that need to be stressed when working with the international phonemic alphabet. First, is the fact that we are no longer concerned with how a word is traditionally spelt. Additionally, we need to stress that we are only concerned with the sounds needed to correctly produce a word. So rather than numerous spellings, which can often be pronounced in different ways, we have one symbol representing one sound. Once we can isolate a sound, rather than juggling various spellings, we can work with our students on how to say that sound. Doing that successfully is related to manner and place of articulation, which will be covered shortly. To get a better understanding of the phonemic alphabet, let's take a look at our chart. In the bottom half of our chart, we have our consonant sounds. Each symbol represents one sound, whereas in the Roman alphabet, one consonant letter could produce a few different sounds, such as in the case with a C. It can be a hard C as in cake, or it can be a soft C as in nice. With the phonemic alphabet, we alleviate that confusion, again with one phoneme representing one sound. We've gotten rid of the C and replaced it simply with a C sound as in cake, or a S sound as in nice. Most of the consonant sounds are represented by letters which coincide with the Roman alphabet. However, we do have eight symbols which can confuse students when they're just getting this introduced to them. First, we have this symbol which represents a CH sound, typically spelt with a CH. Next to that, we have this symbol which represents the G sound. Moving further down, we have our TH sounds. One sound would be TH as in think, another sound would be TH as in that. Moving over, we have this symbol which represents the SH sound, and this symbol which represents the Z sound as in measure. Here, we have the NG symbol which represents the N sound as in song. And lastly, we have this symbol which looks like it would represent the J sound, but it doesn't. It represents the Y sound as in yeah.