Phonetics is the science of speech sounds. It asks three kinds of question: how do we make a sound in the mouth, what does that sound look like as a wave, and how does the ear take it in? Though actually, this is not the same as phonology, and students often treat the two as one word. Phonetics looks at the sounds themselves — even tiny differences that a language may not “count.” Phonology looks at the pattern inside a language: which sounds it treats as the same, and the rules they follow. Phonics is different again: that is a way of teaching children to read by matching letters to sounds. “Phonetics” is mostly a university and specialist word. In class, a teacher might say “the phonetics of this word” to mean “how you say it,” which is a looser, everyday use — useful, but not the whole science. The name of the subject takes a singular verb: phonetics is hard, not phonetics are hard.