Phonics is a way of teaching people to read. The teacher shows that letters and groups of letters stand for sounds, and the learner “sounds out” the word instead of only remembering its shape. Though actually, English is messy here: cat and ship follow the story quite well, but one, the, who, and enough do not, so phonics is a tool, not a complete map of English. In Taiwan, parents and primary schools talk about this a lot for young children. It is an education word, heard in classrooms and cram schools, not a linguistics-lab word. Do not mix it with phonetics (the science of how speech sounds are made and heard) or phonology (the sound system of a language). People sometimes say “I am learning phonics” when they mean they are learning English pronunciation. Kind, but not exact: phonics is about reading letters, not about a perfect accent. Like mathematics, the word looks plural but names one method: phonics is useful.